Faculty Job Talk by Dr Lai Shangqi : Towards Secure and Practical Network Middleboxes

Recently, Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) transformed network middleboxes from dedicated and tightly coupled hardware/software devices to composable software running on commodity cloud instances. Accordingly, cloud data centres have become one of the major vendors for network maintenance/data processing. This emerging concept offers a more economical and flexible solution for enterprises to build and maintain their network systems and services. The privacy issue, however, may thwart the enterprises’ willingness to adopt this innovation since the middlebox may contain critical information regarding the network or its users. 

In this talk, the speaker will introduce their efforts in building secure middleboxes to protect critical network infrastructure information and sensitive data in networks, respectively. He will describe how they integrate different secure techniques systematically to achieve their security goal while preserving a practical runtime performance. He will also discuss some open research questions in this area.

About the Speaker

Dr Lai Shangqi is a research fellow at Monash University. He received his PhD degree from Monash University in 2020. Before that, he got the MS degree from The University of Hong Kong in 2015 and the BE degree from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2014. His research focuses on designing systems to address the security and privacy issues of cloud and networked applications. His work has been published in top venues in cyber-security and network, such as ACM CCS, NDSS, ACM AsiaCCS, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE TDSC.

He is a tenure-track faculty candidate for the Information Systems & Technology, Cybersecurity cluster.