Chris Kanich

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Computer Science.

I received my Ph.D. from the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering, studying in the Systems and Networking Group under Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage.

Contact information:

In person:
room 1109 SEO (office) or ERF 2054 (lab)
Spring 2013 office hours: Tuesday 3:30-4:30, Wednesday 10-11, and by appointment

Snail mail:
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dept. Computer Science
Room 1109 SEO (M/C 152)
Chicago, IL 60607

Phone: 312-355-0950

Email: ckanich@uic.edu
skype: ckanich

Research interests

My current work includes analysis of Internet attackers' financial successes, investigating human factors in effective Internet security mechanisms, and employing economic analysis tools to cybercrime.

I am very interested in new collaborations, motivated students, and lively conversation regarding security research - please email me if you are interested in any of these!

Selected media coverage
Show Me the Money in The Economist, Oct 15th 2011
Click Trajectories in The New York Times (and the editorial), May 2011
Spamalytics in Wired magazine, March 2011
Active Projects
Cloudsweeper allows users to audit, encrypt, and redact sensitive information within cloud storage accounts. This project helps us better understand the role of cleartext password emailing, the underground value of stolen accounts, and new ways to improve the security of sensitive, globally acceissible information.
Students
Ph.D. students:
Peter Snyder
Xiang Huo
Selected publications

At IMC '12:
Taster's Choice: A Comparative Analysis of Spam Feeds. Andreas Pitsillidis, Chris Kanich, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Kirill Levchenko, and Stefan Savage. PDF

At WEIS '12:
Analysis of E-Crime in Crowd-sourced Labor Markets: Mechanical Turk vs. Freelancer. Vaibhav Garg, Chris Kanich, and L. Jean Camp. PDF

At USENIX Security '11:
Show Me the Money: Characterizing Spam-advertised Revenue Chris Kanich, Nicholas Weaver, Damon McCoy, Tristan Halvorson, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. PDF

At WOOT '11:
Putting Out a HIT: Crowdsourcing Malware Installs Chris Kanich, Stephen Checkoway, and Keaton Mowery. PDF

At IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2011:
Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Mark Felegyhazi, Chris Grier, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, He Liu, Damon McCoy, Nicholas Weaver, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. PDF web

At CCS '08:
Spamalytics: an Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Brandon Enright, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. PDF web

Full publication list.

Professional Activities

Program Committee, 2013 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference(ACSAC)
Program Co-Chair, 2013 USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET)
Program Committee, 2013 USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud)
Program Committee, 2012 USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET)

Teaching

CS 450, Spring 2013.

CSE 123, Summer Session I, 2011.

CSE 127, Spring 2011. Teaching assistant for Hovav Shacham.

CSE 123, Fall 2010. Teaching assistant for Alex Snoeren (co-TA with Marti Motoyama).

CS 180, Ancient times (2002-2005). Lab TA.