About

Kirill Levchenko is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. His research focuses on cyber-physical system security, network security, e-crime, and Internet service abuse. He is involved in major projects such as the PacketLab network measurement system and aviation cyber-security, and his interests include network attacks and defenses, cyber-physical and embedded system security analysis. Levchenko's work emphasizes understanding and mitigating security threats in complex computing environments. He teaches courses related to computer security and cyber security, contributing to the education of students in these critical areas. His research aims to enhance the security and privacy of internet-connected systems, addressing contemporary challenges in cybersecurity.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Embedded system
• Computer Security
• Operating system
• Political Science
• Distributed computing
• Real-time computing
• Computer network
• Internet privacy
• World Wide Web
• Business
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• Correction to: Marionette Measurement: Measurement Support Under the PacketLab Model

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Balancing Act: Navigating Control and Data Plane Responsibilities for Fast Operation in Programmable Networks

  Journal of Network and Systems Management · 2025-02-25 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Marionette Measurement: Measurement Support Under the PacketLab Model

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Regional features of the manifestation of demographic threats in terms of characteristics of marriage, motherhood and childhood

  Национальная безопасность / nota bene · 2024-05-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  The subject of the research is the regional characteristics of demographic indicators of marriage, motherhood and childhood, their relationship with the indicator of natural growth. At the same time, the natural decline of the population is considered as one of the key threats to the demographic and, consequently, national security of the population of the Russian Federation, since it entails a number of economic and geopolitical risks. The variability of indicators of marriage, motherhood and childhood is considered in the study as a possible source of variability in natural growth. Therefore, the regional peculiarities of the numerical characteristics of each of these features are analyzed in detail. Special attention is paid to regions showing abnormal values. In addition, the nature of the influence of individual indicators of marriage, motherhood and childhood on the natural growth rate has been studied in order to identify key factors determining the variability of the latter. The paper uses methods of exploratory data analysis: elements of descriptive statistics and diagrams to demonstrate trends . The closeness of the relationship between the indicators of the natural growth coefficient and the indicators of marriage, motherhood and childhood is also determined and a model of linear regression of the natural growth coefficient on the total fertility rate is constructed. The authors' contribution to the development of the topic is that, despite the simplicity of the stated methods, the study allowed us to identify regions with specific features in one or more indicators of marriage, motherhood, childhood, as well as natural growth. Further study of the features of regional demographic policy, the state of health, and cultural characteristics of the selected regions will allow us to borrow positive experience and correct negative trends, which should lead to a decrease in the factors determining the depopulation of the Russian population in terms of marriage, motherhood and childhood. The regression model allowed us to conclude that measures are needed to increase the total fertility rate, since, among the factors considered, the natural growth rate turned out to be the most sensitive to this trait, which simultaneously characterizes the propensity of women to motherhood and the intensity of fertility

  PublisherDOI

• CAPSID: A Private Session ID System for Small UAVs

  2024-12-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has recently mandated that small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) be equipped with a transmitter that broadcasts the UAV's serial number, location, and altitude. The inclusion of a unique identifier in the form of a UAV serial number has stoked fears that the identifier will be used to track UAV operators and has even led some UAV operators to file a lawsuit against the FAA.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Probability theory. The workshop

  2023-12-21

  bookSenior author

  The tutorial provides solutions to examples in the main sections of probability theory using Microsoft Excel and the R language. Meets the requirements of the federal state educational standards of higher education of the latest generation. For students of higher educational institutions studying economics.

  PublisherDOI

• Story Beyond the Eye: Glyph Positions Break PDF Text Redaction

  Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2023-05-15 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this work we find that many current redactions of PDF text are insecure due to non-redacted character positioning information. In particular, subpixel-sized horizontal shifts in redacted and non-redacted characters can be recovered and used to effectively deredact first and last names. Unfortunately these findings affect redactions where the text underneath the black box is removed from the PDF. We demonstrate these findings by performing a comprehensive vulnerability assessment of common PDF redaction types. We examine 11 popular PDF redaction tools, including Adobe Acrobat, and find that they leak information about redacted text. We also effectively deredact hundreds of real-world PDF redactions, including those found in OIG investigation reports and FOIA responses. To correct the problem, we have released open source algorithms to fix vulnerable redactions and reduce the amount of information leaked by nonexcising redactions (where the text underneath the redaction is copy-pastable). We have also notified the developers of the studied redaction tools. We have notified the Office of Inspector General, the Free Law Project, PACER, Adobe, Microsoft, and the US Department of Justice. We are working with several of these groups to prevent our discoveries from being used for malicious purposes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Responding to Network Failures at Data-plane Speeds with Network Programmability

  2023-05-08 · 7 citations

  article

  Measurement studies show that equipment failures happen quite frequently and pose a challenge to reliable network operation. Quickly recovering from failures is critical to meeting service guarantees. Traditional routing protocols, due to being executed in a distributed fashion and involving multiple devices in a network, require non-negligible time to recompute routes upon failures. SDN with OpenFlow simplifies route recomputation, but the time to compute and install alternative forwarding entries can still result in significant packet loss. Existing fast failover mechanisms cannot handle all types of failure and do not guarantee the use of the best paths. In this paper, we present FELIX, an approach for failure recovery that reroutes around failures at data plane timescales. Felix works by efficiently pre-computing tactics to handle failure scenarios that can be quickly activated in the data plane in response to failures. Our evaluation shows that our approach can recover from failures up to three orders of magnitude faster than existing SDN approaches.

  PublisherDOI

• Poster: Empirically Testing the PacketLab Model

  2023-10-23 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  PacketLab is a recently proposed model for accessing remote vantage points. The core design is for the vantage points to export low-level network operations that measurement researchers could rely on to construct more complex measurements. Motivating the model is the assumption that such an approach can overcome persistent challenges such as the operational cost and security concerns of vantage point sharing that researchers face in launching distributed active Internet measurement experiments. However, the limitations imposed by the core design merit a deeper analysis of the applicability of such model to real-world measurements of interest. We undertook this analysis based on a survey of recent Internet measurement studies, followed by an empirical comparison of PacketLab-based versus native implementations of common measurement methods. We showed that for several canonical measurement types common in past studies, PacketLab yielded similar results to native versions of the same measurements. Our results suggest that PacketLab could help reproduce or extend around 16.4% (28 out of 171) of all surveyed studies and accommodate a variety of measurements from latency, throughput, network path, to non-timing data.

  PublisherDOI

• Mathematical statistics. Workshop

  2023-05-26 · 1 citations

  book

  The textbook presents the conditions of problems and solutions of examples in the main sections of mathematical statistics using Microsoft Excel and the R language. Meets the requirements of the federal state educational standards of higher education of the latest generation. For students of higher educational institutions studying in economic specialties.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• EAGER: USBRCCR: Collaborative: Securing Networks in the Programmable Data Plane Era

  NSF · $200k · 2017–2020

• CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Foundations of Secure Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems

  NSF · $560k · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Damon McCoy

  New York University

  58 shared

• Vern Paxson

  University of California, Berkeley

  55 shared

• Stefan Savage

  UC San Diego Health System

  41 shared

• Sadia Afroz

  38 shared

• Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

  37 shared

• Jonathan K. Kummerfeld

  37 shared

• Rebecca S. Portnoff

  37 shared

• Greg Durrett

  37 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2006

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2002

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2000

Awards & honors

• Celebration of Excellence (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 202…