I am a Full Professor at the University of Münster, and I also work part-time in the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems Group at the University of Twente.

Until 2019, I was a Lecturer in Networks and Security at the University of Sydney (that’s Asst. Prof. in other systems), Australia. Before that, I was a Researcher at NICTA (later CSIRO's Data61), also in Sydney, where I worked on network security and was part of the Security Business Team.

I hold a PhD from Technical University of Munich. I did both my post-grad and under-grad studies at Eberhard Karls University, Tuebingen, one of Germany’s classic universities.

Organisations

My research interests revolve around understanding and improving the Internet for everyone, with a particular focus on security aspects. Most recently, I have been working on

  • Global-scale measurement of Internet service deployments and their security
  • Data-driven security mechanisms
  • Analysis of emerging technology and its implications

I view my work through the lens of real-world implications. The tech is not always what matters—it’s the embedding in our world that makes it meaningful. Hence, I work with other disciplines and industry alike to make the Internet a safer, more secure, and altogether more interesting and useful place.

Publications

2025

Detecting and Characterizing DDoS Scrubbing from Global BGP Routing: Insights from Five Leading Scrubbers (2025)In Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2026. Springer (Accepted/In press). Khadka, S. K., Bayhan, S., Holz, R. & Hesselman, C. E. W.Investigating Middlebox Deployment and Characteristics in Dutch Autonomous Systems (2025)In 2025 21st International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM). IEEE (Accepted/In press). Ulukapi, B., Sperotto, A. & Holz, R.Characterizing Hosting and Security Practices for Public-Facing LDAP Servers (2025)In 2025 21st International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) (Accepted/In press). Luvizotto Cesar, G., Öndarö, G., Kaspereit, J., Ising, F., Schinzel, S., Jonker, M. & Holz, R.A First Look at the Adoption of BGP-based DDoS Scrubbing Services: A 5-year Longitudinal Analysis (2025)[Contribution to conference › Paper] 21th International Conference on Network and Service Management, CNSM 2025 (Accepted/In press). Khadka, S. K., Bayhan, S., Holz, R., Shokoohi, S., Barcellos, M. & Hesselman, C. E. W.Towards Understanding Middlebox Deployments in Dutch ASes: Impact of IP Sampling Size (2025)In ANRW '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Applied Networking Research Workshop (pp. 174-176). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Ulukapi, B., Sperotto, A. & Holz, R.https://doi.org/10.1145/3744200.3744765Web Crawl Refusals: Insights From Common Crawl (2025)In Passive and Active Measurement: 26th International Conference, PAM 2025, Virtual Event, March 10–12, 2025, Proceedings (pp. 197–214) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 15567). Springer. Ansar, M., Sperotto, A. & Holz, R.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85960-1_9Tracing Vendors: A Middlebox-Centric Study of Network Interference (2025)In 2025 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW) (pp. 176-186) (Proceedings - 10th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops, Euro S and PW 2025; Vol. 2025). IEEE. Ulukapi, B., Sperotto, A. & Holz, R.https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW67616.2025.00027

2024

Is a Name Enough? A First Look into Detecting Clouds Using DNS Pointer Records (2024)In 2024 20th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) (pp. 1-5). Article 10814277. IEEE Advancing Technology for Humanity. Tarahomi, S., Sommese, R., de Boer, P.-T., Linssen, J., Holz, R. & Sperotto, A.https://doi.org/10.23919/CNSM62983.2024.10814277Boosting Communication Efficiency of Federated Learning's Secure Aggregation (2024)In 2024 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks - Supplemental Volume, DSN-S 2024 (pp. 157-158). IEEE. Nazemi, N., Tavallaie, O., Chen, S., Zomaya, A. Y. & Holz, R.https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN-S60304.2024.00045Analysis of DNS Dependencies and their Security Implications in Australia: A Comparative Study of General and Indigenous Populations (2024)[Working paper › Preprint]. ArXiv.org. Nazemi, N., Tavallaie, O., Mandalari, A. M., Haddadi, H., Holz, R. & Zomaya, A. Y.https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.12958

Research profiles

Address

University of Twente

Zilverling (building no. 11)
Hallenweg 19
7522 NH Enschede
Netherlands

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