Verisign Labs
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The Verisign Labs team brings a tremendous breadth of expertise and talent.

Matt Thomas

Distinguished Engineer


Biography

Matt Thomas is a distinguished engineer at Verisign. His research focuses on numerous aspects of internet security, stability, and resiliency, including but not limited to Distributed Denial of Service attacks, domain name abuse, miscreant behavior within the Domain Name System, and large-scale measurements and evolving trends in internet architectures. Matt is responsible for supporting an array of activities across the company, including data-driven analytical functions for Verisign’s value-added services, supporting internal research initiatives, external engagement, and supporting critical data analysis efforts. He has more than 15 years of experience working with large distributed data collection and analysis systems.

Prior to joining Verisign in 2008, Matt worked as a software engineer at AT&T. He was responsible for designing and implementing a distributed data collection system that measured and analyzed the operational performance of systems and services throughout the world.

Matt currently serves as the vice chair of the board of directors for the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group. He is also an active member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Matt has authored more than 10 peer-reviewed publications and he has been awarded 11 patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional and Certified Hadoop Developer.

Matt holds a Master of Science in information systems and technology, and a Bachelor of Science in computer science from The Johns Hopkins University.

Publications

Matt Thomas, Duane Wessels, Moritz Müller, Wes Hardaker, Taejoong Chung, Willem Toorop, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij
Roll, Roll, Roll your Root: A Comprehensive Analysis of the First Ever DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover, Internet Measurement Conference 2019
2019
Publications / Papers
Qi Alfred Chen, Matt Thomas, Eric Osterweil, Yulong Cao, Jie You, Z. Morley Mao
Client-side Name Collision Vulnerability in the New gTLD Era: A Systematic Study. CCS '17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
2017
Publications / Papers
Alfred Chen, Eric Osterweil, Matt Thomas, Z. Morley Mao
MitM Attack by Name Collision: Cause Analysis and WPAD Vulnerability Assessment in the New gTLD Era
2016
Publications / Papers
Matt Thomas, Duane Wessels
A Study of Caching Behavior with Respect to Root Server TTLS. DNS-OARC Fall '15 Workshop
2015
Presentations / Panels
Matt Thomas, Lixia Zhang, Allison Mankin
Report from the Workshop on Root Causes and Mitigation of Name Collisions. Internet-draft, WIP
2015
Requests for Comments (RFC) / Internet Drafts
Matt Thomas, Duane Wessels
Analysis of TCP traffic in DITL data. DNS-OARC Fall '14 Workshop
2014
Presentations / Panels
Aziz Mohaisen, Matt Thomas
Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root. HotPETs '14
2014
Publications / Papers
Matt Thomas, Andy Simpson
Analysis Techniques for Determining Cause and Ownership of DNS Queries. Workshop and Prize on Root Causes and Mitigation of Name Collisions
2014
Publications / Papers
Matt Thomas, Aziz Mohaisen
Detecting Botnet Domains Using DNS Traffic. DNS-OARC Workshop
2014
Publications / Papers
Aziz Mohaisen, Matt Thomas
Kindred Domains: Detecting and Clustering Botnet Domains Using DNS Traffic. SIMPLEX with WWW
2014
Publications / Papers
Aziz Mohaisen, Matt Thomas
Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root. ACM WPES 2014
2014
Publications / Papers
Matt Thomas, Yannis Labrou, Andy Simpson
The Effectiveness of Block Lists in Preventing Collisions. Workshop and Prize on Root Causes and Mitigation of Name Collisions
2014
Publications / Papers
Andy Simpson , Matt Thomas, Eric Osterweil
Regional Affinity for Applied for gTLD Strings. DNS-OARC 2013 Fall Workshop
2013
Presentations / Panels
Matt Thomas, Vern Paxson, Nick Feamster, Christian Kreibich, Chris Grier, Scott Hollenbeck
Understanding the Domain Registration Behavior of Spammers. Internet Measurement Conference 2013
2013
Publications / Papers
Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, Gianluca Demartini, Djellel Eddine Difallah, Ahmed Elsayed Mostafa, Vincenzo Russo, Matt Thomas
A Demonstration of DNS^3: a Semantic-Aware DNS Service. ISWC
2011
Publications / Papers

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