Sulyab Thottungal Valapu

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I am a sixth year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Southern California, and a member of the ANT Lab. My advisor is Prof. John Heidemann.

My research uses Internet measurement to understand the real-world effects of the Internet’s ongoing evolution, whether driven by new protocols (such as IPv6), changing deployment practices (such as cloud computing), or new applications (such as Web3). I focus on developing methods to measure how these changes are adopted in practice and on understanding the complications that arise as old and new mechanisms overlap, with implications for the security, privacy, and usability of the Internet. Recently, I have been studying the security risks that arise when DNS is integrated with other naming ecosystems (such as cryptocurrency wallets and software repositories) where stale linkages can be exploited, as well as IPv6 adoption and the privacy risks and opportunities created by the shift to IPv6.

I received my B.Tech. in Information Technology from IIIT Allahabad in 2018. Between then and joining USC, I worked as a software engineer at Arista Networks, where I was part of the routing team.

news

May 24, 2026 I will give a talk at NANOG 97 on moving beyond binary metrics for understanding IPv6 adoption, based on our paper.
May 07, 2026 New preprint: Zombies in Alternate Realities: The Afterlife of Domain Names in DNS Integrations is now available at arXiv.
May 04, 2026 I will be joining Verisign as a research intern in Summer 2026, working on DNS security.
Nov 21, 2025 New paper: Towards a Non-Binary View of IPv6 Adoption is now available in the conference proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2025. Alternately, you can access the arXiv version here, or check out our blog post for a brief overview.
Sep 02, 2025 New poster: Crowd-SFT: Crowdsourcing for LLM Alignment is now available in the conference proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPS) 2025. Alternately, you can access the arXiv version here.