I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at UCLA. My research interests are in System Security and Networked Systems.
I am planning to take on 1-2 PhD students for 2024-2025 graduate admissions cycle! If you are interested in working with me as a PhD student, then please apply to UCLA Computer Science and list my name as a preferred advisor in your application.
Prior to joining UCLA, I spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar in the FOCI Center at the University of Washington, supervised by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ratul Mahajan. Before that, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. I was fortunate to be co-advised by David E. Culler and Raluca Ada Popa. During my Ph.D., I worked in the Sky Computing Lab, the RISE Lab (the predecessor to the Sky Computing Lab), and the Buildings, Energy, and Transportation Systems (BETS) research group. Prior to that, I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate student, I worked in the Software-Defined Buildings (SDB) research group, which was the predecessor to BETS.
At UCLA:
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley:
Rethinking System Design for Expressive Cryptography.
Sam Kumar.
PhD Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.
Original/official version available on ProQuest and as Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2023-194.
Skyplane: Optimizing Transfer Cost and Throughput Using Cloud-Aware Overlays.
Paras Jain, Sam Kumar, Sarah Wooders, Shishir G. Patil, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica.
20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2023).
MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation.
Sam Kumar, David E. Culler, and Raluca Ada Popa.
15th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2021).
Received a Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI 2021.
Performant TCP for Low-Power Wireless Networks.
Sam Kumar, Michael P Andersen, Hyung-Sin Kim, and David E. Culler.
17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2020).
Received an Applied Networking Research Prize from the IETF/IRTF in 2022.
Ghostor: Toward a Secure Data-Sharing System from Decentralized Trust.
(*Co-primary authors) *Yuncong Hu, *Sam Kumar, and Raluca Ada Popa.
17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2020).
JEDI: Many-to-Many End-to-End Encryption and Key Delegation for IoT.
Extended Version (published as Technical Report No. arXiv:1905.13369 [cs.CR]).
Sam Kumar, Yuncong Hu, Michael P Andersen, Raluca Ada Popa, and David E. Culler.
28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2019).
WAVE: A Decentralized Authorization Framework with Transitive Delegation.
Michael P Andersen, Sam Kumar, Moustafa AbdelBaky, Gabe Fierro, John Kolb, Hyung-Sin Kim, David E. Culler, and Raluca Ada Popa.
28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2019).
Thread/OpenThread: A Compromise in Low-Power Wireless Multihop Network Architecture for the Internet of Things.
Hyung-Sin Kim, Sam Kumar, and David E. Culler.
IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 57, No. 7 (ComMag July 2019).
System Architecture Directions for Post-SoC/32-bit Networked Sensors.
Hyung-Sin Kim, Michael P Andersen, Kaifei Chen, Sam Kumar, William J. Zhao, Kevin Ma, and David E. Culler.
16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2018).
Received a Best Paper Runner-Up Award at SenSys 2018.
Demo Abstract: Bringing Full-Scale TCP to Low-Power Networks.
Sam Kumar, Michael P Andersen, Hyung-Sin Kim, and David E. Culler.
16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2018).
Well-Connected Microzones for Increased Building Efficiency and Occupant Comfort.
Michael P Andersen, Gabe Fierro, Sam Kumar, Joyce Kim, Edward A. Arens, Hui Zhang, Paul Raftery, and David E. Culler.
2016 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (SSB 2016).
DISTIL: Design and Implementation of a Scalable Synchrophasor Data Processing System.
Michael P Andersen, Sam Kumar, Connor Brooks, Alexandra von Meier, and David E. Culler.
2015 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm 2015).
Poster Abstract: Well-Connected Microzones for Increased Building Efficiency and Occupant Comfort.
Michael P Andersen, Gabe Fierro, Sam Kumar, Michael Chen, Leonard Truong, Joyce Kim, Edward A. Arens, Hui Zhang, Paul Raftery, and David E. Culler.
2nd ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 2015).
TCPlp: TCP for Low Power Wireless Networks
Published at NSDI 2020 (see above)
Relevant GitHub repositories: Adoption in OpenThread, Code for Reproducibility
MAGE: Memory-Aware Garbling Engine
Published at OSDI 2021 (see above)
Relevant GitHub repositories: MAGE System, Scripts for Experiments
JEDI: Joining Encryption and Delegation for IoT
Published at USENIX Security 2019 (see above)
Relevant GitHub repositories: JEDI Cryptography Library, JEDI Prototype Implementation
GDPFS: The Global Data Plane File System
CS 262A Project Report (Spring 2016)
Relevant GitHub repositories: GDPFS Implementation, FIG Tree Library (C), FIG Tree Prototype (Java)
Mr. Plotter: The Multiresolution Plotter (Project Page)
Project Report (published as Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2018-85)
Relevant GitHub repositories: Mr. Plotter Web Application, Mr. Plotter Desktop Application, Mr. Plotter QML Library