Research Summary:

I am working on measuring trends towards centralization in different internet infrastructures, such as Domain Name Systems (DNS), Certificate Authorities (CA), and Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) across different regions, understanding the implications, and building an end-user client system that addresses concerns about the user-facing aspect of DNS centralization and provides enhanced privacy and performance to users. This work is supported by Comcast Innovation Fund.

PhD Research Projects:

1. Decentralization, Privacy, and Performance for DNS.
2. Each at its Own Pace: Third‐Party Dependency and Centralization Around the World.
3. The Art of Giving Directions: How CDNs Steer Clients to the World’s Content

Publications:

• Kedar Thiagarajan, Rashna Kumar, Fabián E. Bustamante. 2023. A Peek Backstage: Organizations in DNS Resolver Hierarchies. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference (ACM SIGCOMM ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1088–1090. · Sep 1, 2023
• Rashna Kumar, Sana Asif, Elise Lee, and Fabián E. Bustamante. 2023. Each at its Own Pace: Third‐Party Dependency and Centralization Around the World. Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst. 7, 1, Article 4, March 2023, 29 pages (SIGMETRICS’23). 
• Rashna Kumar, Fabián E. Bustamante. 2021.Decentralization, privacy and performance for DNS. In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM ’21 Poster and Demo Sessions (SIGCOMM ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 56–58. (1st Place in ACM SIGCOMM’21 Student Research Competition)

Research Internship:

Working as a Computer Networks summer’22 research intern in Yahoo under the supervision of Yifan Hu and Meizhu Liu, on understanding the deployment of IPv6 and its effect on user tracking.

Awards:

• Northwestern’s Terminal Year Fellowship (2023-2024)
• Virtual Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) 2022 Scholar
• Travel Award for 2022 CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women
• 1st Place in ACM SIGCOMM’21 Student Research Competition

Undergraduate Research Projects:

1. Investigating Online Advertisement Fraud on YouTube, supervised by Prof. Mobin Javed.
2. “Cross-domain Authorship Attribution on Dark-web forums”, supervised by Prof. Fareed Zaffar.