Paul Pearce

Recent News!

• 2024-09: I am the PI on the NSF NeTS Early-Career Investigator Workshop 2025. Please apply!
• 2023-03: Incredibly excited to receive an NSF CAREER Award!
• 2022-11: Our work on ZDNS received the IMC Community Contribution Award!
• 2022-11: Thrilled to be selected as a 2022 DARPA Riser!

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor focusing on network security and measurement starting Fall 2019. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley under Vern Paxson in 2018, sticking around after my MS and BS degrees.

[ CV ] [ Google Scholar ] [ NSF NeTS Early-Career Investigator Workshop 2025] [ CS8803-EMS Fall 2023 ]

Publications

• Understanding Routing-Induced Censorship Changes Globally, ACM CCS 2024. Abhishek Bhaskar, Paul Pearce. [To Appear]
  
  
• Seeds of Scanning: Exploring the Effects of Datasets, Methods, and Metrics on IPv6 Internet Scanning, IMC 2024. Grant Williams Paul Pearce. [To Appear]
  
  
• BluePrint: Automatic Malware Signature Generation for Internet Scanning, RAID 2024. Kevin Stevens, Mert Erdemir, Hang Zhang, Taesoo Kim, Paul Pearce. [To Appear]
  
  
• 6SENSE: Internet-Wide IPv6 Scanning and its Security Applications, USENIX Security 2024. Grant Williams, Mert Erdemir, Amanda Hsu, Shraddha Bhat, Abhishek Bhaskar, Frank Li, Paul Pearce. [Paper]
  
  
• Arcanum: Detecting and Evaluating the Privacy Risks of Browser Extensions on Web Pages and Web Content, USENIX Security 2024. Qinge Xie, Manoj Vignesh Kasi Murali, Paul Pearce, Frank Li. [Paper]
  
  
• A First Look At NAT64 Deployment In-The-Wild, PAM 2024. Amanda Hsu, Frank Li, Paul Pearce, Oliver Gasser. [Paper]
  
  
• Fiat Lux: Illuminating IPv6 Apportionment With Different Datasets, SIGMETRICS 2023. Amanda Hsu, Frank Li, Paul Pearce. [Paper]
  
  
• Glowing in the Dark:Uncovering IPv6 Address Discovery and Scanning Strategies in the Wild, USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2023). Hammas Bin Tanveer, Rachee Singh, Paul Pearce, Rishab Nithyanand. [Paper]
  
  
• Cart-ology: Intercepting Targeted Advertising via Ad Network Identity Entanglement, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2022). ChangSeok Oh, Damon McCoy, Chris Kanich, Paul Pearce. [Paper]
  
  
• ZDNS: A Fast DNS Toolkit for Internet Measurement, ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2022). Liz Izhikevich, Gautam Akiwate, Briana Berger, Spencer Drakontaidis, Anna Ascheman, Paul Pearce, David Adrian, Zakir Durumeric. IMC Community Contribution Award Winner [Paper]
  
  
• Many Roads Lead To Rome: How Packet Headers Influence DNS Censorship Measurement, 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2022). Abhishek Bhaskar, Paul Pearce. [Paper]
  
  
• Deep Entity Classification: Abusive Account Detection for Online Social Networks, 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2021). Teng Xu, Gerard Goossen, Huseyin Kerem Cevahir, Sara Khodeir, Yingyezhe Jin, Frank Li, Shawn Shan, Sagar Patel, David Freeman, Paul Pearce. [Paper]
  
  
• DELF: Safeguarding deletion correctness in Online Social Networks, 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2020). Katriel Cohn-Gordon, Georgios Damaskinos, Divino Neto, Joshi Cordova, Benoît Reitz, Benjamin Strahs, Daniel Obenshain, Paul Pearce, Ioannis Papagiannis. [Paper]
  
  
• Evaluating Changes to Fake Account Verification Systems, The 23rd International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2020). Fedor Kozlov, Isabella Yuen, Jakub Kowalczyk, Daniel Bernhardt, David Freeman, Paul Pearce, Ivan Ivanov. [Paper]
  
  
• Reading the Tea leaves: A Comparative Analysis of Threat Intelligence, 28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2019). Vector Guo Li, Matthew Dunn, Paul Pearce, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, Kirill Levchenko. [Paper]
  
  
• Schrödinger’s RAT: Profiling the Stakeholders in the Remote Access Trojan Ecosystem, 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2018). Mohammad Rezaeirad, Brown Farinholt, Hitesh Dharmdasani, Paul Pearce, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy. [Paper]
  
  
• Methods and Systems for Understanding Large-Scale Internet Threats, PhD Dissertation, UC Berkeley (Aug 2018). Paul Pearce. [Paper]
  
  
• Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation, 26th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2017). Paul Pearce, Ben Jones, Frank Li, Roya Ensafi, Nick Weaver, Nick Feamster, Vern Paxson. [Paper] [Talk]
  
  
• Characterizing the Nature and Dynamics of Tor Exit Blocking, 26th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2017). Rachee Singh, Rishab Nithyanand, Sadia Afroz, Paul Pearce, Michael Carl Tschantz, Phillipa Gill, Vern Paxson. [Paper]
  
  
• Augur: Internet-Wide Detection of Connectivity Disruptions, 38th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2017). Paul Pearce, Roya Ensafi, Frank Li, Nick Feamster, Vern Paxson. [Paper]
  
  
• To Catch a Ratter: Monitoring the Behavior of Amateur DarkComet RAT Operators in the Wild, 38th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2017). Brown Farinholt, Mohammad Rezaeirad, Paul Pearce, Hitesh Dharmdasani, Haikuo Yiny, Stevens Le Blond, Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko. [Paper] [Talk]
  
  
• Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications, 36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2015). Distinguished Practical Paper Kurt Thomas, Elie Bursztein, Chris Grier, Grant Ho, Nav Jagpal, Alexandros Kapravelos, Damon McCoy, Antonio Nappa, Vern Paxson, Paul Pearce, Niels Provos, Moheeb Abu Rajab. [Paper] [Talk]
  
  
• Characterizing Large-Scale Click Fraud in ZeroAccess, 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2014). Paul Pearce, Vacha Dave, Chris Grier, Kirill Levchenko, Saikat Guha, Damon McCoy, Vern Paxson, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker. [Paper] [Talk]
  
  
• The ZeroAccess Auto-Clicking and Search-Hijacking Click Fraud Modules, Technical report, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Dec 2013. Paul Pearce, Chris Grier, Vern Paxson, Vacha Dave, Damon McCoy, Goeffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. [Paper]
  
  
• AdDroid: Privilege Separation for Applications and Advertisers in Android, 7th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2012). Paul Pearce, Adrienne Porter Felt, Gabriel Nunez, David Wagner. [Paper] [Talk]
  
  
• What’s Clicking What? Techniques and Innovations of Today’s Clickbots, 8th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2011). Brad Miller, Paul Pearce and Chris Grier, Christian Kreibich, Vern Paxson. [Paper] [Talk]
  
  
• Resource Management in the Tessellation Manycore OS, 2nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar '10). Juan A. Colmenares, Sarah Bird, Henry Cook, Paul Pearce, David Zhu, John Shalf, Krste Asanovic, and John Kubiatowicz. [Paper]
  
  
• Abstractions for Scalable Operating Systems on Manycore Architectures, Work-In-Progress, Poster, 22nd ACM Symposium Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '09). Kevin Klues, Barret Rhoden, David (Yu) Zhu, Paul Pearce, Eric Brewer, John Kubiatowicz. [Paper]

Invited Journal and Magazine Articles

• Towards Continual Measurement of Global Network-Level Censorship, IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, 2018 Special Issue. Paul Pearce, Roya Ensafi, Frank Li, Nick Feamster, Vern Paxson. [Paper]
  
  
• Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation, USENIX ;login:, Winter 2017. Paul Pearce, Ben Jones, Frank Li, Roya Ensafi, Nick Weaver, Nick Feamster, Vern Paxson. [Paper]

Current PhD Students

• Abhishek Bhaskar
• Grant Williams
• Amanda Hsu (co-advised with Frank Li)
• Mert Erdemir (co-advised with Frank Li)
• Hugo Hue (co-advised with Frank Li)

Life

I am an avid Cal Football fanatic. I've bowled since I was 9, and carry an average in the 180s (high game is 289, darn 10 pin). While an undergraduate I initiated at the Mu Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the national EECS honor society. I am a proud product of the California Community College system, having attended both Chaffey and Mount San Antonio colleges.
New! I'm now really into aquariums.

PowerPoint source to my slides are available upon request.