Yehuda Afek

Biography

I received a B.A. degree from the Technion in Electrical Engineering in 1978, and M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees from University of California Los-Angeles (UCLA) in 1983 and 1985 respectively, both in Computer Science. I was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell-Labs from 1985 to 1989. In 1989 I joined the computer science department at Tel-Aviv University. I was a consultant for AT&T research labs from 1989 to 2000. In 2001 I founded Riverhead Networks together with Anat bremler-Barr, Dan Touitou, and Yuval Rachmilevitch. Riverhead Networks is the only company to have succeeded in providing a solution to the problem of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the Internet. The Riverhead Guard, our flag product, protects thousands of sites (including some from fortune-5, and many from fortune-500), keeping them up and running despite massive multi Gbps attacks over long periods of time. Riverhead was acquired by Cisco in 2004, after which I remained a director in Cisco until May of 2009. I have since then returned to a full time professorship position at Tel-Aviv University.

Research Interest

My research interests span the range from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based), in concurrent programming (concurrent data structures and transactional memory), and in networking (network security, protecting against denial of service attacks and routing). I often examine synchronization and coordination problems in these areas using tools and models from theoretical computer science and related disciplines.