Brent ByungHoon Kang

Assistant Professor
Dept. of Software and Information Systems, College of Computing and Informatics University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223-0001
bbkangatuncc edu, O: 704-687-8440 Fax:704-687-4893(Attn: B. Kang)
Office: Rm 310B Woodward Hall

Summary on Research, Teaching, and Service Activities

C.V. on Research, Teaching, and Service Activities

Brent Hoon Kang received his Ph.D in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley.  His Ph.D. research efforts in distributed systems and services were supported by the Berkeley Digital Library project and the OceanStore project.  Prior to Berkeley, he received his M.S in Computer Science from University of Maryland at College Park with a focus in computer network and his B.S in Computer Science and Statistics from Seoul National University with 1st place distinction among computer science major. He has also worked on building a collaboration system for scientific data management at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and worked as a software engineer at QuarkXpress.

Research

Research on Infrastructure Systems and Security:

·         This paper is also featured in pcworld.com, eweek.com, CSO online, techworld.com and Symantec news.

Peer-to-Peer Botnets: Overview and Case Study
Julian B. Grizzard, The Johns Hopkins University; Vikram Sharma, Chris Nunnery, and Brent ByungHoon Kang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; David Dagon, Georgia Institute of Technology
Read the paper in PDF | HTML

  • Kang has received TIAA_CREF Biggs Faculty Fellowship in April 2007. With this fellowship, Kang plans to work on a Premise-Aware Access Framework for Regulation Compliance of Financial Organizations.
  • Kang’s ongoing work titled Privilege Messaging: An Authorization Framework over Email Infrastructure, has received positive feedbacks from the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Community. It was presented as the opening paper in the LISA technical track on December 6, 2006. Please visit http://isr.uncc.edu/pmessaging for latest updates.
  • RepuScore: Recently, Singaraju and Kang have proposed RepuScore, a collaborative reputation management framework over email infrastrucure, which allows participating organizations to establish sender accountability on the basis of senders' past actions. RepuScore's generalized design can be deployed with any Sender Authentication techniques such as SPF, SenderID and DKIM. This paper was published in LISA 07.
  • RepuScore has been deployed in a number of organization, please check out our recent SpamAssassin Plug-in and consider joining this effort!
  • Since Fall 2005, Kang has also been actively working on the Bank of America Honeynet Project with faculty members from both the SIS and Criminal Justice Departments. He has supported one Ph.D student, Vikram Sharma, and is currently advising Chris Nunnery for peer-to-peer bot topology and detection. Check out this bot source map.

Recent Publications:

Previous Projects at Berkeley:

Teaching and Education

Education of Cyber Defender and Systems Architect:

Students:

  • Kang has established the Infrastructure Systems Research Lab with a focus on securely architecting large-scale infrastructure systems such as file/storage systems and email. In this lab, he has been working with two Ph.D and three M.S students since Spring 2005.
  • Kang has graduated two Masters students, one is employed at TIAA-CREF and the other at Bank of America. Especially, the project manager at Bank of America called Kang to thank ISR lab and his supporting letter for the student. Kang is going to graduate two more Masters students this coming December 2006.
  • In a synergistic effort to educate researchers, Kang has been working with graduate students on (1) securing email infrastructure, (2) scaling large-scale information services through optimistic replication as described above. Further teaching and research topics are “premise-aware data protection infrastructure”, “IT infrastructure system design for regulation compliance”, and “networked infrastructure defense design”.
  • At UNCC, Kang’s dedication to teaching has been recognized with high ratings by his students’ evaluations. Notably, he has received very high score in the category: “Instructor shows enthusiasm in lecture” in all four classes that he has taught. This shows Kang’s enthusiasm in teaching and student education. Class evaluations from senior faculty members also noted that Kang is knowledgeable, organized, and very approachable.

Classes:

  • Kang has developed classes for Infrastructure Systems Architect. An infrastructure systems architect is defined as someone who is capable of planning the capacity of the infrastructure system and architecting the systems services and components to meet the requirements from the business, policy, organization, and the security aspect. These IS Architects should also be capable of designing the systems with network security defense and recovery planning in mind.
  • Recently, he has developed a new undergraduate course: Introduction to IT Infrastructure Systems with the aim of relaying the theory, principles and practice of Infrastructure Systems Architects. Course topics include networked information systems design, distributed systems principles, IT infrastructure design for regulation compliance, file systems, and large-scale messaging architecture. Kang also enhanced the previous System Integration course by adding a strong research emphasis on distributed networked systems.
  • Kang is currently teaching Introduction to IT Infrastructure Systems Design class Spring, Fall 2006.
  • Kang taught Systems Integration class Fall 2004, and Spring 2005 at UNCC.
  • At Berkeley, Kang taught the core concepts of computer networking in weekly discussion sessions as a GSI for EECS 122(Computer Network) by Jean Walrand and Kevin Fall in Spring 2002 in EECS Berkeley.
  • Our IT program was ranked in top 10 according to this data:  http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopPrograms.aspx#10

 

Services

External:

  • Kang has been serving as Usenix Representative for UNC Charlotte since Dec 2004.
  • Kang has been a PI for planet-lab consortium since Fall 2004. www.planet-lab.org

          University:

  • Kang served as Bank of America Teaching Award Week Preparation Committee Member during Fall 2005 (Provost appointed group)
  • Kang served on New Faculty Orientation Week Committee. (Provost appointed group. Kang’s suggestions regarding the web site structure have been very instrumental and have received acknowledgement from the staffs and new faculty members.)
  • Kang has served as a member of the Faculty Center for Teaching and e-Learning unit review committee since Spring 2006. (Academic affairs appointed group)

College:

  • Kang has run our college seminar for Fall 2006.
  • Kang served on the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee for SIS Dept.
  • Kang served on the Infrastructure Committee for SIS Dept.
  • Kang served on the IT Infrastructure Committee, representing SIS Dept. He offered a great deal of technical advice on IT infrastructure issues for the College.