Laurent Vanbever
Assistant Associate Professor — ETH Zürich
I am an assistant associate professor at ETH Zürich. My research interests lie at the crossroads of theory and practice, with a focus on network programmability and Internet routing. Overall, I aim at making (large) computer networks more performant and easier to manage.
I completed my PhD in computer science in October 2012 at the University of Louvain under the guidance of Olivier Bonaventure. My thesis is entitled "Methods and Techniques for Disruption-Free Network Reconfiguration". After my PhD, I spent two years at Princeton University working with Jennifer Rexford as a postdoctoral researcher.
Prior to my PhD, I earned my master degree in computer science from the University of Louvain in 2008. I also earned a master degree in management from the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management in 2010.
To contact me, drop me an email at (preferred) or .
To find out more about myself and my work, check out my:
Recent & selected papers (details, full list)
Recent incomplete news (more news here)
2019
| Dec | > | I got tenured at ETH Zürich! |
| Nov | > | For the second time after 2016, I have been awarded the Golden Owl of the VSETH! The Owl is awarded by the VSETH, ETH Zurich's students association, and "honours lecturers who have provided exceptional teaching". Huge kudos to the teaching assistants from NSG without whom this wouldn't have been possible! |
| Sep | > | I got awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The grant (SyNET) aims at automatically generating correct network configurations rather than verifying them. This also means that our group will soon recruit PhD students and postdocs. Ping us if interested! |
| > | Our paper on adversarial inputs for networks got accepted to HotNets 2019! | |
| Jun | > | Two papers accepted at NSDI 2020! |
| > | New seminar lecture on "Learning, Reasoning and Control" in the context of Communication Networks. Check it out: https://seminar-net.ethz.ch | |
| > | Happy to give one of the keynote at TMA 2019. See you in Paris. |
2018
| Dec | > | "Blink: Fast Connectivity Recovery Entirely in the Data Plane" accepted at NSDI 2019! |
| Nov | > | Happy to serve on the technical program committee of USENIX NSDI 2020. |
| > | "SABRE: Protecting Bitcoin against Routing Attacks" accepted at NDSS 2019! | |
| Oct | > | Happy to serve on the technical program committee of ACM SIGCOMM 2019. |
| > | The technical program of ACM CoNEXT 2018 is now online. Check it out and see you in Heraklion! | |
| Sep | > | "Hardware-Accelerated Network Control Planes" accepted at HotNets 2018! |
| Aug | > | Happy to serve on the external technical program committee of PLDI 2019. |
| April | > | "NetHide: Secure and Practical Network Topology Obfuscation" accepted at Usenix Security 2018! |
| > | We just released the Call for Papers for the upcoming CoNEXT 2018. Check it out here. Abstract registration deadline is on June 15; full paper submission deadline on June 22. Theo and I are looking forward to your submissions! | |
| > | The final version of our three NSDI 2018 papers are now available online. Check them out here! | |
| Feb | > | Looking forward to start teaching Communication Networks this semester, for the third time already. |
| > | "Bayonet: Probabilistic Inference for Networks" conditionally accepted at PLDI 2018! | |
| > | Participating to a NII Shonan Meeting on the theory and practice of data plane programming. | |
| Jan | > | Martin Vechev and I just launched ICE, a new group initiative on programmable and dependable networked systems. |
| > | The list of accepted paper for ACM SOSR 2018 (co-chaired with Dave Maltz) is now online! Detailed program coming soon. | |
| > | Happy to serve as program co-chair together with Theo Benson for ACM CoNEXT 2018! | |
| > | Maria Apostolaki receives one of the 2018 Applied Networking Research Prize for our IEEE S&P paper on Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies! See our website for more information on the project. |
Show older news Hide older news
2017
| Dec | > | We got three accepted papers at the upcoming NSDI!! Stay tuned to learn about: automated network captioning and network reasoning (with Net2Text), declarative traffic mirroring (with Stroboscope), and partial network configuration synthesis (with NetComplete). |
| Nov | > | Our research group finally has a dedicated webpage. Check it out at: https://nsg.ee.ethz.ch! |
| Oct | > | Our institute is looking for a new colleague (professor or tenure-track assistant professor) in Embedded Information Systems. Come work with Roger, Lothar and I! The closing date for the application deadline is 15 December 2017. |
| > | "Integrating Verification and Repair into the Control Plane" will appear at ACM HotNets 2017! | |
| Sep | > | Happy to announce that my research proposal on Data-Driven Internet Routing has been accepted for funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)! |
| > | The ACM SOSR 2018 website is now online. The submission deadline is November 10, 2017 (register your paper by November 3, 2017). Dave Maltz and I are looking forward to receive your submission(s)! | |
| Aug | > | Dave Maltz and I just released the Call for Papers for ACM SOSR 2018. |
| > | Our work on SDNRacer and BigBug got covered by OVS Orbit. Check out Ahmed's podcast and our project website. | |
| > | TPC member for ACM SIGCOMM 2018. | |
| June | > | Our DIMVA paper "Unsupervised Detection of APT C&C; Channels using Web Request Graphs" was covered by swissinfo.ch: "Switzerland boosts cyber defences as attacks escalate". |
| > | The camera-ready version of our upcoming SIGCOMM 2017 paper on predictive fast reroute is now online. Check it out to see how we can make BGP converge within few seconds! | |
| > | "Boosting the BGP convergence in SDXes with SWIFT" accepted as a demo at SIGCOMM 2017. | |
| > | I'll present our work on routing attacks on Bitcoin at EPFL's Summer Research Institute. My slides are available here. | |
| > | Our paper done in collaboration with armasuisse entitled "Unsupervised Detection of APT C&C; Channels using Web Request Graphs" got covered by the Swiss Federal Department of Defense. Read the media report in English, German, French or Italian. | |
| > | Roland Meier (a student in our group) wins the CyCon Junior Scholar Award 2017 for his Master thesis which led to the iTap paper! | |
| > | Happy to serve as Program Chair (together with Dave Maltz) for ACM SOSR 2018! | |
| May | > | SWIFT: Predictive Fast Reroute accepted at ACM SIGCOMM 2017! |
| April | > | Network-wide Configuration Synthesis accepted at CAV 2017. More info on the project (including a pre-print) can be found on synet.ethz.ch. |
| > | Our Oakland paper Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies got covered by Slashdot.org, Bitcoin.com, The Register, The Coin Telegraph and Naked Security and The Morning Paper. More info on the project can be found on btc-hijack.ethz.ch. Check also our guest post on Hacking, Distributed (Emin Gün Sirer's blog). | |
| > | Unsupervised Detection of APT C&C Channels using Web Request Graphs accepted at DIMVA 2017. | |
| Feb | > | Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies accepted at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2017! |
| Jan | > | Four papers accepted at ACM SOSR 2017! |
| > | TPC member for ACM CoNEXT 2017. |
2016
| Dec | > | "Safe Update of Hybrid SDN Networks" to appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. |
| Nov | > | I'm humbled to receive the Golden Owl award of the VSETH for our Communication Networks course. Looking forward to make the course better next semester! |
| > | Check out SyNet, our new approach to automatically produce network-wide configurations (supporting multiple protocols) out of high-level objectives. Visit our website and read our technical report for more details. | |
| Oct | > | Participating as a jury member in a series of calls for innovation put together by Swisscom, Telia, and Proximus. Looking forward to see interesting ideas! More information available here. |
| > | "Sentinels: Guarding ISP Networks from Forwarding Anomalies" accepted at the ACM CoNEXT 2016 Student Workshop. | |
| Sep | > | "Mille-Feuille: Putting ISP traffic under the scalpel" accepted at ACM HotNets 2016. |
| > | TPC member (External Review Committee) for ACM PLDI 2017. | |
| Aug | > | TPC member for ACM SIGCOMM 2017. |
| July | > | TPC member for ACM SOSR 2017. Please consider submitting your best SDN work! |
| > | "Fibbing in action: On-demand load-balancing for better video delivery" accepted as a demo at SIGCOMM 2016. | |
| June | > | Roland Meier (student in our group) wins an ETH Medal for his thesis on “SDN-based Network Obfuscation”! |
| May | > | Our new paper "Hijacking Bitcoin: Large-scale Network Attacks on Cryptocurrencies" is available online. |
| Mar | > | "iSDX: An Industrial-Scale Software Defined Internet Exchange Point" wins the NSDI'2016 Community Award! The paper was also selected by USENIX ATC in their Best of the Rest session. |
| Jan | > | "iRacer: Concurrency Analysis for Software-Defined Networks" accepted to PLDI 2016! |
| > | "Scaling the Internet Routing System through Distributed Route Aggregation" accepted to IEEE TON! | |
| > | Chairing NSDI 2016 Poster Session together with Aruna Balasubramanian. Please consider submitting! Call for posters is available here. | |
| > | TPC member for ACM CoNEXT 2016. | |
| > | We organize an ETH-wide programming challenge. The best team will get a fully-paid trip to San Francisco! If you are an ETH student, please register yourself online here. A flyer for the event describing the event is available here. |
2015
2014
Teaching (Fall 2019)
| > | Seminar in Communication Networks: Learning, Reasoning and Control (new!) | |
| > | Advanced Topics in Communication Networks | |
| > | Discrete Event Systems |
Show previous courses Hide previous courses
| > | Communication Networks (Spring 2019) | |
| > | Advanced Topics in Communication Networks (Fall 2018) | |
| > | Discrete Event Systems (Fall 2018) | |
| > | Communication Networks (Spring 2018) | |
| > | Discrete Event Systems (Fall 2017) | |
| > | Communication Networks (Spring 2017) | |
| > | Discrete Event Systems (Fall 2016) | |
| > | Communication Networks (Spring 2016) | |
| > | Discrete Event Systems (Fall 2015) |