Updated: April 17, 2006

About Jason and His Recent Accomplishments
Jason is currently a first-year graduate student at Carnegie-Mellon University pursuing a doctoral degree in computer science. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December of 2004 with a double major in computer science and mathematics.

He was recently selected as a recipient of the 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. In addition to this honor, Jason, along with his collaborators from Sandia’s Center for Cyber Defenders (CCD) institute successfully submitted a paper to the 2006 USENIX Security Symposium.

About the Fellowship
The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master’s or doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards approximately 1,000 Graduate Research Fellowships—with a current stipend of $30,000 for a 12-month period. Learn more.

About the Conference and Papers
USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, will sponsor the 15th annual Security Symposium in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on July 31 – August 4, 2006. Jason and his CCD collaborators submitted the paper, “Passive Data-Link Layer 802.11 Wireless Device Driver Fingerprinting.” (This will be the second year in a row that Jason has had a paper accepted by USENIX.)

In 2005, Jason, along with his collaborators from the University of Wisconsin, submitted the paper, “Mapping Internet Sensors with Probe Response Attacks” to the USENIX Security Symposium. It was honored as “Best Paper” (note: not merely best “student” paper). As Jason and the lead author had not yet started grad school when this occurred, this was a truly noteworthy accomplishment.

“I think many of you will find Jason’s paper quite interesting. I’m very proud of Jason and honored to have a student intern of his caliber associated with the CCD,” stated Steve Hurd, Jason’s former CCD Sandia mentor.

About His Work at Sandia
Jason originally joined the CCD in Summer 2004 as a DHS Scholar student intern. He then spent several weeks at the end of that summer as a “regular” SNL student intern, before returning to Wisconsin to finish his BS in Computer Science. Among his accomplishments was a detailed analysis on a particular spyware/adware vendor that received a lot of attention throughout Sandia.

He returned to Sandia in January, 2005, and worked full-time at the CCD until late July. During that time, he assumed a leadership role in several projects, including Wireless Fingerprinting and Wireless Logging activities (in conjunction with Jamie Van Randwyk’s Wireless Intrusion Detection Architecture LDRD), as well as a research effort to identify “Stepping Stones” (a “stepping stone” is an intermediate host in a chain of computers, often associated with attacks).

For the month of August 2005, he remained with the CCD as a telecommuter and finished his work on the wireless projects. Check out Jason’s 2005 spotlight to learn more about him.

Jason’s Plans This Summer
This summer, Jason will work with Vern Paxson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)—a nonprofit basic research institute affiliated with UC Berkeley.

Congratulations, Jason!