Education

• M.S., Ph.D. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• B.S. (Washington University in St. Louis)

Research

My research focuses primarily on computer and network security.  In particular, I'm interested in the design, analysis, and implementation of robust and secure distributed systems with an emphasis on adaptive and scalable security mechanisms for overlay networks and the Internet.  Some past projects to which I have contributed are listed below.

• Mitigating the effects of malicious transaction state overload on SIP infrastructures [ISM08]
• Enabling flexible trust management for service-oriented environments (joint work with IBM Research) [WWW09]
• Propagating alerts that identify misbehaving peers in peer-to-peer systems [NCA06]
• Reducing traffic analysis in wireless sensor networks [DCOSS06]
• Preventing bandwidth exhaustion in peer-to-peer media streaming systems [MMCN06,MDS07]

Publications

• William Conner, Arun Iyengar, Thomas Mikalsen, Isabelle Rouvellou, and Klara Nahrstedt.  "A trust management framework for service-oriented environments."  Eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2009. (PDF)
• William Conner and Klara Nahrstedt.  "Protecting SIP proxy servers from ringing-based denial-of-service attacks."  Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), 2008. (PDF)
• William Conner and Klara Nahrstedt.  "Securing peer-to-peer media streaming systems from selfish and malicious behavior."  Fourth Middleware Doctoral Symposium (MDS), 2007. (PDF)
• Michael Treaster, William Conner, Indranil Gupta, and Klara Nahrstedt.  "ContagAlert: using contagion theory for adaptive, distributed alert propagation."  Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA), 2006. (PDF)
• William Conner, Tarek Abdelzaher, and Klara Nahrstedt.  "Using data aggregation to prevent traffic analysis in wireless sensor networks."  International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), 2006. (PDF)
• William Conner, Klara Nahrstedt, and Indranil Gupta.  "Preventing DoS attacks in peer-to-peer media streaming systems."  Thirteenth Annual SPIE/ACM Conference on Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN), 2006. (PDF)