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 bbkangatuncc edu, O: 704-687-8440 Fax:704-687-4893(Attn: B. Kang) Office: Rm 310B Woodward Hall

Here is Executive Summary on Research, Teaching, and Service Activities (Updated on Aug 31st 2009)

Here is C.V. on Research, Teaching, and Service Activities (Updated on Aug 31st 2009)

Here is Summary of Research Impacts (Updated on Aug 31st 2009)
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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! Our paper titled "Waledac Protocol: How and Why", G. Sinclair, C. Nunnery and B. Kang has been accepted to Malware 2009 Montreal.  Please feel free to email me for a draft copy.
• News! Our paper titled "Towards Complete Node Enumeration in a Peer-to-Peer Botnet", B. Kang, E. Chan-Tin, C. P. Lee, J. Tyra, H. J. Kang, C. Nunnery, Z. Wadler, G. Sinclair, N. Hopper, D. Dagon, and Y. Kim, has been accepted for publication at ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communication Security (ASIACCS 2009).     Presentation slides can be found here.
• 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 2009 and June 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! 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!.
• Our paper titled "Tracking Email Reputation for Authenticated Sender Identities", G. Singaraju, B. Kang, has been accepted to CEAS 2008 (Conference on Email and Spam), a major conference on Email and Spam. 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.

Recent Publications:

• Brent ByungHoon Kang, Eric Chan-Tin, Christopher P. Lee, James Tyra, Hun Jeong Kang, Chris Nunnery, Zachariah Wadler, Greg Sinclair, Nicholas Hopper, David Dagon, and Yongdae Kim, Towards Complete Node Enumeration in a Peer-to-Peer Botnet, ACM Symposium on Information, Computer & Communication Security (ASIACCS 2009)
• 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, (HTML | PDF) 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
• J. Grizzard, V. Sharma, C. Nunnery, B. Kang, and D. Dagon, Peer-to-Peer Botnets: Overview and Case Study ( HTML | PDF ), 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
• 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

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:

• NSF Panel reviewer for 2007, 2008, 2009.
• PC member for:
  Usenix Large-Installation Systems Administrations (LISA 2008, 2009)
  International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm 2009)
  Usenix Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET 2009)
  Conference on Email and Spam (CEAS 2009)
  The 5th workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPSec 2009)
   
• Reviewer for:
  IEEE Oakland Security and Privacy (Oakland 2008)
  Usenix Large-Installation Systems Administrations (LISA 2007)
  Usenix File and Storage Systems (FAST 2005)

• 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

          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.