Yehuda Afek's home page

Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences
Tel-Aviv University,
Ramat Aviv,
Tel-Aviv 69978

email: afek at tau ac il

Phone: +972-3-640-8952.
Fax: +972-3-640-6281.

Teaching

Interests

My research interests include: distributed computing - asynchronous systems (both shared memory and message passing), theoretical aspects of distributed computing; and in particular fault tolerance; Concurrent programming - concurrent data structures and transactional memory; networking - network security, protecting against denial of service attacks and routing. I often examine synchronization and coordination problems in these areas using tools and models from theoretical computer science and related disciplines.

Short Bio

I received a B.A.from the Technion in Electrical Engineering in 1978, and M.Sc and Ph.D. from University of California Los-Angeles (UCLA) in 1983 and 1985 respectively, both in Computer Science. I was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell-Labs from 1985 to 1989. In 1989 I joined the computer science department at Tel-Aviv University. I was a consultant for AT&T research labs from 1988 to 2000. In 2001 I founded Riverhead Networks together with Anat bremler-Barr, Dan Touitou, and Yuval Rachmilevitch. Riverhead Networks is the only company to have succeeded in providing a solution to the problem of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the Internet. The Riverhead Guard, as it is called, protects thousands of sites (including some from fortune-5, and many from fortune-500), keeping them up and running despite massive multi Gbps attacks over long periods of time. Riverhead was acquired by Cisco in 2004, after which I remained as a director in Cisco until May of 2009.

DDoS / Riverhead related talks

NANOG-23 Conference Oakland, California, "Diversion and Sieving Techniques to Defeat DDoS", October 22, 2001.
RIPE-41 Conference Amsterdam 1/2002, DDOS Tutorial [PDF - 2.2MB], with Hank Nussbacher
NANOG-28 Conference Salt Lake City, Utah, "MPLS-Based Synchronous Traffic Shunt", June 3, 2003.