Laurent Vanbever

I am an associate professor at ETH Zurich. My research interests lie at the crossroads of theory and practice, with a focus on network programmability. Overall, I aim at making networks both more performant and easier to manage.

I completed my PhD in computer science in 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 find out more about my work, check out my resume, activity reports (20222021, 2020), research and teaching statements.

You can also find me on the Fediverse / Mastodon: @laurent@vanbever.ch.

Selected Publications

Taming the transient while reconfiguring BGP

Tibor Schneider, Roland Schmid, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM 2023. New York City, NY, USA (September 2023).

Enhancing Global Network Monitoring with Magnifier

Tobias Bühler, Romain Jacob, Ingmar Poese, Laurent Vanbever

USENIX NSDI 2023. Boston, MA, USA (April 2023).

xBGP: Faster Innovation in Routing Protocols

Thomas Wirtgen, Tom Rousseaux, Quentin De Coninck, Nicolas Rybowski, Randy Bush, Laurent Vanbever, Axel Legay, Olivier Bonaventure

USENIX NSDI 2023. Boston, MA, USA (April 2023).

Learning to Configure Computer Networks with Neural Algorithmic Reasoning

Luca Beurer-Kellner, Martin Vechev, Laurent Vanbever, Petar Velickovic

NeurIPS 2022. New Orleans, LA, USA (November 2022).

Generating representative, live network traffic out of millions of code repositories

Tobias Bühler, Roland Schmid, Sandro Lutz, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2022. Austin, Texas, USA (November 2022).

A New Hope for Network Model Generalization

Alexander Dietmüller, Siddhant Ray, Romain Jacob, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2022. Austin, Texas, USA (November 2022).

On the Complexity of Network-Wide Configuration Synthesis

Tibor Schneider, Roland Schmid, Laurent Vanbever

IEEE ICNP 2022. Lexington, KY, USA (November 2022).

Aggregate-Based Congestion Control for Pulse-Wave DDoS Defense

Albert Gran Alcoz, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM 2022. Amsterdam, Netherlands (August 2022).

FAst In-Network GraY Failure Detection for ISPs

Edgar Costa Molero, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM 2022. Amsterdam, Netherlands (August 2022).

ABM: Active Buffer Management in Datacenters

Vamsi Addanki, Maria Apostolaki, Manya Ghobadi, Stefan Schmid, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM 2022. Amsterdam, Netherlands (August 2022).

ditto: WAN Traffic Obfuscation at Line Rate

Roland Meier, Vincent Lenders, Laurent Vanbever

NDSS Symposium 2022. San Diego, CA, USA (April 2022).

Snowcap: Synthesizing Network-Wide Configuration Updates

Tibor Schneider, Rüdiger Birkner, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM 2021. Online (August 2021).

Metha: Network Verifiers Need To Be Correct Too!

Rüdiger Birkner *, Tobias Brodmann *, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

USENIX NSDI 2021. Online (April 2021).

xBGP: When you can’t wait for the IETF and vendors

Thomas Wirtgen, Quentin De Coninck, Randy Bush, Laurent Vanbever, Olivier Bonaventure

ACM HotNets 2020. Chicago, Illinois, USA (November 2020).

P2GO: P4 Profile-Guided Optimizations

Patrick Wintermeyer, Maria Apostolaki, Alexander Dietmüller, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2020. Chicago, Illinois, USA (November 2020).

Probabilistic Verification of Network Configurations

Samuel Steffen, Timon Gehr, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

ACM SIGCOMM 2020. New York, USA (August 2020).

An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works

Thomas Holterbach, Tobias Bühler, Tino Rellstab, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM CCR 2020. Volume 50 Issue 2 (April 2020).

Config2Spec: Mining Network Specifications from Network Configurations

Rüdiger Birkner, Dana Drachsler Cohen, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

USENIX NSDI 2020. Santa Clara, California, USA (February 2020).

SP-PIFO: Approximating Push-In First-Out Behaviors using Strict-Priority Queues

Albert Gran Alcoz, Alexander Dietmüller, Laurent Vanbever

USENIX NSDI 2020. Santa Clara, California, USA (February 2020).

(Self) Driving Under the Influence: Intoxicating Adversarial Network Inputs

Roland Meier, Thomas Holterbach, Stephan Keck, Matthias Stähli, Vincent Lenders, Ankit Singla, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2019. Princeton, NJ, USA (November 2019).

Blink: Fast Connectivity Recovery Entirely in the Data Plane

Thomas Holterbach, Edgar Costa Molero, Maria Apostolaki, Alberto Dainotti, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

USENIX NSDI 2019. Boston, Massachusetts, USA (February 2019).

SABRE: Protecting Bitcoin against Routing Attacks

Maria Apostolaki, Gian Marti, Jan Müller, Laurent Vanbever

NDSS Symposium 2019. San Diego, CA, USA (February 2019).

Hardware-Accelerated Network Control Planes

Edgar Costa Molero, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2018. Redmond, WA, USA (November 2018).

NetHide: Secure and Practical Network Topology Obfuscation

Roland Meier, Petar Tsankov, Vincent Lenders, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

USENIX Security 2018. Baltimore, MD, USA (August 2018).

Bayonet: Probabilistic Inference for Networks

Timon Gehr, Sasa Misailovic, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Pascal Wiesman, Martin Vechev

PLDI 2018. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (June 2018).

Stroboscope: Declarative Network Monitoring on a Budget

Olivier Tilmans, Tobias Bühler, Ingmar Poese, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

USENIX NSDI 2018. Renton, Washington, USA (April 2018).

NetComplete: Practical Network-Wide Configuration Synthesis with Autocompletion

Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

USENIX NSDI 2018. Renton, Washington, USA (April 2018).

Net2Text: Query-Guided Summarization of Network Forwarding Behaviors

Rüdiger Birkner, Dana Drachsler Cohen, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

USENIX NSDI 2018. Renton, Washington, USA (April 2018).

Integrating Verification and Repair into the Control Plane

Aaron Gember-Jacobson, Costin Raiciu, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2017. Palo Alto, California, USA (November 2017).

SWIFT: Predictive Fast Reroute.

Thomas Holterbach, Stefano Vissicchio, Alberto Dainotti, Laurent Vanbever

ACM SIGCOMM 2017. Los Angeles, California, USA (August 2017).

Network-wide Configuration Synthesis.

Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

CAV 2017. Heidelberg, Germany (July 2017).

Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies.

Maria Apostolaki, Aviv Zohar, Laurent Vanbever

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2017. San Jose, CA, USA (May 2017).

Mille-Feuille: Putting ISP traffic under the scalpel.

Olivier Tilmans, Tobias Bühler, Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2016. Atlanta, Georgia, USA (November 2016).

SDNRacer: Concurrency Analysis for Software-Defined Networks.

Ahmed El-Hassany, Jeremie Miserez, Pavol Bielik, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

ACM PLDI 2016. Santa Barbara, CA, USA (June 2016).

An Industrial-Scale Software Defined Internet Exchange Point.

Arpit Gupta, Robert MacDavid, Rüdiger Birkner, Marco Canini, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford, Laurent Vanbever

Usenix NSDI 2016. Santa Clara, CA, USA (March 2016).

Destroying networks for fun (and profit).

Nick Shelly, Brendan Tschaen, Klaus-Tycho Forster, Michael Chang, Theophilus Benson, Laurent Vanbever

ACM HotNets 2015. Philadelphia, PA, USA (November 2015).

Central Control Over Distributed Routing.

Stefano Vissicchio, Olivier Tilmans, Laurent Vanbever, Jennifer Rexford

ACM SIGCOMM 2015. London, UK (August 2015).

Media coverage: ipSpace

RAPTOR: Routing Attacks on Privacy in Tor.

Yixin Sun, Anne Edmundson, Laurent Vanbever, Oscar Li, Jennifer Rexford, Mung Chiang, Prateek Mittal

USENIX Security 2015. Washington, D. C. , USA (August 2015).

DRAGON: Distributed Route Aggregation on the Global Network.

João Luís Sobrinho, Laurent Vanbever, Franck Le, Jennifer Rexford

ACM CoNEXT 2014. Sydney, Australia (December 2014).

Anonymity on QuickSand: Using BGP to Compromise Tor.

Laurent Vanbever, Oscar Li, Jennifer Rexford, Prateek Mittal

ACM HotNets 2014. Los Angeles, CA, USA (October 2014).

Sweet Little Lies: Fake Topologies for Flexible Routing.

Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever, Jennifer Rexford

ACM HotNets 2014. Los Angeles, CA, USA (October 2014).

SDX: A Software Defined Internet Exchange.

Arpit Gupta, Laurent Vanbever, Muhammad Shahbaz, Sean Donovan, Brandon Schlinker, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford, Scott Shenker, Russ Clark, Ethan Katz-Bassett

ACM SIGCOMM 2014. Chicago, IL, USA (August 2014).

SoftCell: Scalable and Flexible Cellular Core Network Architecture.

Xin Jin, Li Erran Li, Laurent Vanbever, Jennifer Rexford

ACM CoNEXT 2013. Santa Barbara, CA, USA (December 2013).

Using Routers to Build Logic Circuits: How Powerful is BGP?

Marco Chiesa, Luca Cittadini, Giuseppe Di Battista, Laurent Vanbever, Stefano Vissicchio

IEEE ICNP 2013. Göttingen, Germany (October 2013).

Fun: Our paper is listed on Accidentally Turing-Complete

Improving Network Agility with Seamless BGP Reconfigurations

Stefano Vissicchio, Laurent Vanbever, Cristel Pelsser, Luca Cittadini, Pierre Francois, Olivier Bonaventure

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Volume 21, Issue 3, pp. 990-1002 (June 2013)

When the Cure is Worse than the Disease: the Impact of Graceful IGP Operations on BGP.

Laurent Vanbever, Stefano Vissicchio, Luca Cittadini, Olivier Bonaventure

IEEE INFOCOM 2013. Turin, Italy (April 2013).

iBGP Deceptions: More Sessions, Fewer Routes.

Stefano Vissicchio, Luca Cittadini, Laurent Vanbever, Olivier Bonaventure

IEEE INFOCOM 2012. Orlando, FL, USA (March 2012).

Seamless Network-Wide IGP Migrations.

Laurent Vanbever, Stefano Vissicchio, Cristel Pelsser, Pierre Francois, Olivier Bonaventure

ACM SIGCOMM 2011. Toronto, ON, Canada (August 2011).