Brent ByungHoon Kang Assistant Professor Dept. of Software and Information Systems, College of Computing and Informatics University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223-0001 bbkang  (AT)  uncc  edu, O: 704-687-8440 Fax:704-687-4893(Attn: B. Kang) Office: Rm 310B Woodward Hall

Brent Hoon Kang received his Ph.D in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley.  His Ph.D. research efforts in distributed systems and services were supported by the Berkeley Digital Library project and the OceanStore project.  Prior to Berkeley, he received his M.S in Computer Science from University of Maryland at College Park with a focus in computer network and his B.S in Computer Science and Statistics from Seoul National University with 1^st place distinction among computer science major. He has also worked on building a collaboration system for scientific data management at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and worked as a software engineer at QuarkXpress.

Research on Infrastructure Systems and Security:

• News! 19 faculty members from across states are coming to our VASA/Infrastructure Lab to participate in the Faculty Development Workshop on Cyber Games and Interactive Simulation June 22-29, 2008. NSF supports our research group at UNCC  to disseminate the use of CyberGames and Interactive Simulations in IA (Information Assurance) educations. Prof. Kang is the lead PI for this collaborative project with NC A&T.
• News! Our paper on Tracking Email Reputation for Authenticated Sender Identities is accepted to CEAS 2008 (Conference on Email and Spam), a premier conference on Email and Spam.
• News! RepuScore and its SpamAssassin Plug-in has been deployed to a few organizations, please contact us if your organization would like to join this effort!.
• News! Concord paper (A Secure Mobile Data Authorization Framework for Regulatory Compliance) has been accepted to Usenix LISA 2008 (This work is supported by TIAA-CREF Biggs Faculty Fellowship.)
• Our collaboration work on peer to peer bots has been published in Usenix HotBots in April 2007.

• This paper is also featured in pcworld.com, eweek.com, CSO online, techworld.com and Symantec news.

  Peer-to-Peer Botnets: Overview and Case Study
  Julian B. Grizzard, The Johns Hopkins University; Vikram Sharma, Chris Nunnery, and Brent ByungHoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; David Dagon, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Read the paper in PDF | HTML

• Kang has received TIAA_CREF Biggs Faculty Fellowship in April 2007. With this fellowship, Kang plans to work on a Premise-Aware Access Framework for Regulation Compliance of Financial Organizations.
• Kang’s ongoing work titled Privilege Messaging: An Authorization Framework over Email Infrastructure, has received positive feedbacks from the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Community. It was presented as the opening paper in the LISA technical track on December 6, 2006. Please visit http://isr.uncc.edu/pmessaging for latest updates.
• RepuScore: Recently, Singaraju and Kang have proposed RepuScore, a collaborative reputation management framework over email infrastrucure, which allows participating organizations to establish sender accountability on the basis of senders' past actions. RepuScore's generalized design can be deployed with any Sender Authentication techniques such as SPF, SenderID and DKIM. This paper was published in LISA 07.
• RepuScore has been deployed in a number of organization, please check out our recent SpamAssassin Plug-in and consider joining this effort!
• Since Fall 2005, Kang has also been actively working on the Bank of America Honeynet Project with faculty members from both the SIS and Criminal Justice Departments. He has supported one Ph.D student, Vikram Sharma, and is currently advising Chris Nunnery for peer-to-peer bot topology and detection. Check out this bot source map.
• Kang’s recent work on extending his dissertation in large-scale distributed data synchronization and replication has had exciting real world impact. Notably, in collaboration with the Microsoft Research Laboratory, an extension of his dissertation work is currently being incorporated into the design of a secure synchronization protocol for WinFS, a next generation Windows File Systems. This work can potentially impact the data replication mechanism in Active Directory and the shared folder replication in Windows servers in the next generation Windows File Systems.
• Kang is working on applying optimistic replication to scaling Wikipedia service. Please check http://isr.uncc.edu/shh for details. You can download the source code for S-Sync, SHH-Visualizer, and RepliWiki. Please check out Kang’s most recent paper submission in this topic: Summary Hash History for Optimistic Replication of Wikipedia.
• In 2005, Kang received the Intepoint Faculty Fellowship from Intepoint, Inc., a Charlotte high tech company. The Intepoint Faculty Fellowship was given to support his research of architecting an efficient data management and a caching layer for large-scale critical infrastructure simulation and visualization. As a DOD funded research project, Intepoint is developing a visual analytic tool that requires secure and large-scale (multiple terabyte) data transfers for simulating the cascading impact on infrastructures such as nuclear power plants, dams, roads and electric power grids in the event of disastrous situations such as bombing, earthquakes and fires. Without an efficient data management layer with secure authorization access framework, the infrastructure simulation cannot securely provide real-time visualization results based on dynamically changing information from data sources that are scattered around the U.S. Through his work with Intepoint, he has developed core solutions to address such challenges.
• In 2004, Kang received the Junior Faculty Research Grant from UNC Charlotte. With this grant, he and a graduate student developed a Vsync tool: a version-based unidirectional synchronization tool for wide-area large scale data transfers. At the Second Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems (WORLDS-2005), a working Vsync implementation was successfully demonstrated, showing that Vsync can provide faster data synchronization performance than Rsync, the most widely used data synchronization tool in the world.

Recent Publications:

• Gautam Singaraju, Jeffery Moss, and Brent Kang: Tracking Email Reputation for Authenticated Sender Identities, Fifth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, CEAS 2008.
• Gautam Singaraju, and Brent Kang, Concord: A Secure Mobile Data Authorization Framework for Regulatory Compliance, USENIX 22nd Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA-2008), November, 2008, San Deigo-CA, USA.
• G. Singaraju and B. Kang, RepuScore: Collaborative Reputation Management Framework for Email Infrastructure, USENIX 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA-2007), November, 2007, Dallas, USA http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/tech/
• J. Grizzard, V. Sharma, C. Nunnery, B. Kang, and D. Dagon, Peer-to-Peer Botnets: Overview and Case Study ( PDF | HTML ), HOTBOTS 07 (First Workshop on Hot Topics in Understanding Botnets
• B. Kang, G. Singaraju, and S. Jain, Privilege Messaging: An Authorization Framework over Email Infrastructure, USENIX 20th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA-2006), December, 2006, Washington-DC, USA http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa06/tech/
• B. Kang, V. Sharma, and P. Thanki, RegColl: Centralized Registry Framework for Infrastructure System Management, USENIX 19th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA-2005), December 4-9, 2005, San Diego, CA, USA http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa05/tech/
• B. Kang, Ph.D. Dissertation, “S2D2: A Framework for Scalable and Secure Optimistic Replication.” UC Berkeley TechReport, UCB/CSD-04-1351
  Committee: Robert Wilensky (Chair), John Kubiatowicz, Eric Brewer, and John Chuang (outside dept. representative).
• B. Kang, R. Wilensky, and J. Kubiatowicz, Hash History Approach for Reconciling Mutual Inconsistency, Proceedings of 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-2003), May 19-22, 2003, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
• B. Kang and R. Wilensky, Toward a Model of Self-administering Data, Proceedings of the first ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL-2001), June 24-28, 2001, Roanoke, VA, USA
• Z. Mao, H. So, B. Kang, and R. Katz, Network Support for Mobile Multimedia using a Self-adaptive Distributed Proxy, Proceedings of 11th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV-2001), June 25-26, 2001, Port Jefferson, New York, USA

Refereed Poster/Demo and Work-In-Progress:

• B.Kang, V. Sharma, P. Thanki, and G. Singaraju, Demo/Poster Session, Vsync: a Version-based Unidirectional Synchronization Tool, Second Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems (WORLDS '05)
• B.Kang, Poster/Work-in-Progress Session, Can Replicas Converge across Partitioned Networks, 3rd USENIX File and Storage Systems 2004, San Francisco http://www.usenix.org/events/fast04/wips/
• B. Kang, Poster Session, A Scalable and Secure Approach for Decentralized Ordering, 19th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-2003), October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY, USA
• B. Kang, Work-in-Progress Session, A Hash-History Based Approach to Management of Weakly Consistent Replicas, 18th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-2001), October 21-24, 2001, Banff, Canada

  Previous Projects at Berkeley:

• Ph.D. dissertation S2D2: A Framework for Scalable and Secure Optimistic Replication, in TechReport UCB//CSD-04-1351.
• Digital Library Project: Re-inventing Scholarly Information Dissemination and Use
• OceanStore Project: Providing Global-Scale Persistent Data

Teaching and Education

Education of Cyber Defender and Systems Architect:

• Kang is currently leading the effort in CCDC (Collegial Cyber Defense Competition) with other senior faculty in the Dept. Two of the students that Kang advises through senior projects won the first place at the national CCDC competition 2006.
• Kang has been actively advising and mentoring students from the NSF Cyber Defender Scholarship program.

  Students:

• Kang has established the Infrastructure Systems Research Lab with a focus on securely architecting large-scale infrastructure systems such as file/storage systems and email. In this lab, he has been working with two Ph.D and three M.S students since Spring 2005.
• Kang has graduated two Masters students, one is employed at TIAA-CREF and the other at Bank of America. Especially, the project manager at Bank of America called Kang to thank ISR lab and his supporting letter for the student. Kang is going to graduate two more Masters students this coming December 2006.
• In a synergistic effort to educate researchers, Kang has been working with graduate students on (1) securing email infrastructure, (2) scaling large-scale information services through optimistic replication as described above. Further teaching and research topics are “premise-aware data protection infrastructure”, “IT infrastructure system design for regulation compliance”, and “networked infrastructure defense design”.
• At UNCC, Kang’s dedication to teaching has been recognized with high ratings by his students’ evaluations. Notably, he has received very high score in the category: “Instructor shows enthusiasm in lecture” in all four classes that he has taught. This shows Kang’s enthusiasm in teaching and student education. Class evaluations from senior faculty members also noted that Kang is knowledgeable, organized, and very approachable.

  Classes:

• Kang has developed classes for Infrastructure Systems Architect. An infrastructure systems architect is defined as someone who is capable of planning the capacity of the infrastructure system and architecting the systems services and components to meet the requirements from the business, policy, organization, and the security aspect. These IS Architects should also be capable of designing the systems with network security defense and recovery planning in mind.
• Recently, he has developed a new undergraduate course: Introduction to IT Infrastructure Systems with the aim of relaying the theory, principles and practice of Infrastructure Systems Architects. Course topics include networked information systems design, distributed systems principles, IT infrastructure design for regulation compliance, file systems, and large-scale messaging architecture. Kang also enhanced the previous System Integration course by adding a strong research emphasis on distributed networked systems.
• Kang is currently teaching Introduction to IT Infrastructure Systems Design class Spring, Fall 2006.
• Kang taught Systems Integration class Fall 2004, and Spring 2005 at UNCC.
• At Berkeley, Kang taught the core concepts of computer networking in weekly discussion sessions as a GSI for EECS 122(Computer Network) by Jean Walrand and Kevin Fall in Spring 2002 in EECS Berkeley.
• Our IT program was ranked in top 10 according to this data:  http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopPrograms.aspx#10

External:

• Kang has been serving as Usenix Representative for UNC Charlotte since Dec 2004.
• Kang has been a PI for planet-lab consortium since Fall 2004. www.planet-lab.org
• Reviewer for Usenix File and Storage Systems (FAST), 2005

  University:

• Kang served as Bank of America Teaching Award Week Preparation Committee Member during Fall 2005 (Provost appointed group)
• Kang served on New Faculty Orientation Week Committee. (Provost appointed group. Kang’s suggestions regarding the web site structure have been very instrumental and have received acknowledgement from the staffs and new faculty members.)
• Kang has served as a member of the Faculty Center for Teaching and e-Learning unit review committee since Spring 2006. (Academic affairs appointed group)

  College:

• Kang has run our college seminar for Fall 2006.
• Kang served on the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee for SIS Dept.
• Kang served on the Infrastructure Committee for SIS Dept.
• Kang served on the IT Infrastructure Committee, representing SIS Dept. He offered a great deal of technical advice on IT infrastructure issues for the College.