I am a fourth year Ph.D. student at ETH Zürich, advised by Laurent Vanbever. The main objective of my research is to develop intent-based methods and tools to operate computer networks more efficiently. Namely, I leverage formal methods (such as SMT solvers) to automatically synthesize provably-correct network configurations from high-level policies. Doing so, my work enables to combine the advantages of centralized network management offered by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) while retaining all the advantages of the existing distributed routing protocols (e.g., OSPF and BGP) such as scalability and robustness.

Before joining ETH Zürich, I had a great privilege to work with Prof. Scott Shenker, where I worked on designing next architecture of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and building systems for troubleshooting existing SDN controllers.

I received a master degree in Computer Science from University of Delaware in 2011 and a bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from Islamic University of Gaza in 2008.

Current Projects

Network-wide Configuration Synthesis: Published at NSDI'18 and CAV'17.
Concurrency Analysis for Software-Defined Networks. Published at SOSR'17, PLDI'16, and SOSR'15.

Publications

[NSDI'18]

NetComplete: Practical Network Wide Configuration Synthesis with Autocompletion

Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

[CAV'17]

Network-wide Configuration Synthesis

Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

[SOSR'17]

BigBug: Practical Concurrency Analysis for SDN

Roman May, Ahmed El-Hassany, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

[arXiv preprint]

Network-wide Configuration Synthesis

Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

[PLDI'16]

SDNRacer: Concurrency Analysis for Software-Defined Networks

Ahmed El-Hassany, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

[ICFP'15]

Efficient Communication and Collection with Compact Normal Forms

Edward Z Yang, Giovanni Campagna, Omer Agacan, Ahmed El-Hassany, Abhishek Kulkarni, Ryan Newton

[SOSR'15]

SDNRacer: Detecting Concurrency Violations in Software-Defined Networks

Jeremie Miserez, Pavol Bielik, Ahmed El-Hassany, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev

[SIGCOMM'14]

Troubleshooting Blackbox SDN Control Software with Minimal Causal Sequencess

Colin Scott, Andreas Wundsam, Barath Raghavan, Aurojit Panda, Andrew Or, Jefferson Lai, Eugene Huang, Zhi Liu, Ahmed El-Hassany, Sam Whitlock, H.B. Acharya, Kyriakos Zarifis, and Scott Shenker

[IEEE SCC'13]

Design and Implementation of a Unified Network Information Services

Ahmed El-Hassany, Ezra Kissel Daniel Gunter, Martin Swany

[IEEE NOMS'12]

Scalable Integrated Performance Analysis of Multi-Gigabit Networks

Ezra Kissel, Ahmed El-Hassany, Guilherme Fernandes, Martin Swany, Dan Gunter, Taghrid Samak, Jennifer M Schopf