Mert Erdemir
PhD candidate, School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, Georgia Institute of Technology
Work firstlastname [at] gatech [dot] eduPersonal first.lastname [at] gmail [dot] comAtlanta, GA, USA
About Me
Hello, World! I'm currently a PhD candidate in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, co-advised by Paul Pearce and Frank Li. Before joining Georgia Tech, I earned my Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Iowa, where I was a member of the SPARTA Lab and was supervised by Rishab Nithyanand. I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey in 2019.
Outside of research, I love dreaming up small project ideas that automate everyday tasks, and I enjoy exploring and experimenting with new technologies. If you have an idea, on pretty much any subject, send me an email and let's figure out how to make it real. You can find my public projects on the Projects page and on my GitHub profile.
Away from the keyboard, I enjoy making music, cooking, and photography (black-and-white, especially, for now). I play electric guitar, I'm still learning the drums, and I'm working on perfecting my Neapolitan pizza dough. If you'd like to chat about music, pizza, or anything else, send me an email!
Research
I do research in Internet measurement, scanning, and security. My work is about building efficient tools and methods that let us see what is actually running on the Internet, and then using that view to find and understand host characteristics and security problems at scale.
Right now my work focuses on three areas:
- IPv6 alias detection. Some IPv6 prefixes are enormous (a /32 alone spans 296, or about 7.9 × 1028, addresses), which can lead to a biased picture of the IPv6 Internet. I work on identifying and characterizing these fully responsive prefixes more accurately and efficiently to improve IPv6 Host Discovery.
- Scanning tools and vulnerability detection. I develop tools and methods that make IPv6 host discovery practical, and I use Internet-wide scanning to detect vulnerabilities at scale, such as exposed Remote Access Toolkits (RATs).
- How the Internet is changing. I study how IP addresses are used, who the emerging actors are, and what these shifts mean for security and measurement.
During my Master's, I worked on designing a Multipath-TCP-based defense against website fingerprinting attacks, exploring how newer networking technologies can protect users' privacy and anonymity. Before that, I worked on IoT intrusion detection, graph and text mining, and game development (though, I'm a little bit rusty on these...).
Teaching
Georgia Institute of Technology
- CS6262: Network Security Fall 2023
The University of Iowa
- CS1210: Computer Science I: Fundamentals Fall 2019, Fall 2020
- CS3330: Algorithms Spring 2020
- CS3620: Operating Systems Spring 2021
Middle East Technical University
- CENG213: Data Structures Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019
- CENG229: C Programming Fall 2018
- CENG232: Logic Design Spring 2017