Bust outside CSE building at UCSD
Sumanth Rao
Ph.D. student, Computer Science
UC San Diego
Email | Scholar | LinkedIn | GitHub
Bust outside CSE building at UCSD

I am a PhD student in the CSE Department at UC San Diego. I'm fortunate to be advised by Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker.

I study cybersecurity problems through large-scale empirical measurement. My work spans threats to the systems we rely on every day: the security of email systems (Oakland'26, WWW'24), aftermarket automotive remote-control systems (USENIX Security'26), and the impact of large-scale IT outages on hospital patient care (JAMA'25). I'm a member of the Sysnet and CryptoSec research groups at UC San Diego. My hometown is Bangalore (ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು), India.

Publications
Lost in Translation: Text Message Spoofing via Email Distinguished Paper Award; Finalist, CSAW Applied Research Competition
Sumanth Rao, Ye Shu, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Enze Liu.
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), San Francisco, May 2026
slides | poster | CVE-2025-46311 | News: TechXplore, UCSD News
BLE Theft Auto: Evaluating the Security of Aftermarket BLE-based Automotive Remote Control Systems
Jerry Yu*, Yibo Wei*, Sumanth Rao, Mohak Vaswani, Jefferson Chien, Christian Dameff, Nishant Bhaskar, Aaron Schulman.
USENIX Security, Baltimore, MD, August 2026
DEFCON 34 | CVE-2026-18411 | News: Wired, Wired video (watch me hack my own car!)
Rooting Out Incorrect RIPE Atlas Probe Geolocations
Katherine Izhikevich, Ben Du, Manda Tran, Sumanth Rao, Alisha Ukani, Ray Bellis, Liz Izhikevich.
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Karlsruhe, Germany, October 2026
Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage
Jeffrey L. Tully*, Sumanth Rao*, Isabel Straw, Rodney A. Gabriel, Chris Longhurst, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Christian J. Dameff.
JAMA Network Open, July 2025
News: Wired, Forbes
Unfiltered: Measuring Cloud-based Email Filtering Bypasses
Sumanth Rao, Enze Liu, Grant Ho, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage.
ACM Web Conference (WWW), Singapore, May 2024
talk | poster | News: DarkReading, ACM TechNews, TL;DR Sec
IRRegularities in the Internet Routing Registry
Ben Du, Katherine Izhikevich, Sumanth Rao, Gautam Akiwate, Cecilia Testart, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc claffy.
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Montréal, Canada, October 2023
No Privacy Among Spies: Assessing the Functionality and Insecurity of Consumer Android Spyware Apps
Enze Liu, Sumanth Rao, Sam Havron, Grant Ho, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Damon McCoy.
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2023
PrivacyCon 2024 | poster | News: UC San Diego News, UC News, CACM News, Tech Xplore

*Equal contribution.

Invited Talks
  • Guest lecture, CSE 227 (Graduate Computer Security), UC San Diego, Oct 13, 2026
  • Measuring hospital ransomware attacks, CAIDA AIMS-5, Feb 2025
  • Panel 6: Mobile Device Security, FTC PrivacyCon, March 2024 | talk
  • Having a great GSoC as an Open Source Newbie!, Google Open Source YouTube, Nov 2022 | talk
Professional Service
  • Program Committee: SIGMETRICS 2027, IEEE Euro S&P 2027, RAID 2026
  • CSE Chezbob Bobfather, UC San Diego (2025-2027) CSE Doctoral Award for Excellence in Service and Leadership (2026)
  • CSE Visit Day Coordinator, UC San Diego (2026)
  • Allyship Co-Chair, UCSD GradWic (2023-2024)
  • VP External, JGSC, UC San Diego (2021-2023)
Teaching & Mentoring
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