Victor Ongkowijaya

Hi! I received my Master’s degree in computer science from Princeton University with full scholarship (formerly a PhD candidate), and received my Bachelor’s degree in computer science with honors from the University of Michigan. I pivoted from research to industry in pursuit of building products, and I currently work as a software engineer at Square (Block, Inc).

During my academic years, I focused primarily on research and teaching. At Princeton, I worked with Prof. Jonathan Mayer in the field of computer privacy & policy and briefly with Prof. Jennifer Rexford in the field of networks & systems. At Michigan, I worked in the field of computer security with Prof. Roya Ensafi, Dr. Michalis Kallitsis, and at Nokia Deepfield. I really enjoy teaching and have taught about 6 semesters of Data Structures & Algorithms (EECS 183, COS 226). Balancing full time semesters with research and teaching was a challenging experience, which was only made possible by my amazing mentors, colleagues, and students.

In my spare time, I enjoy learning new sports, playing video games, and walking with Kip, my happy-go-lucky golden retriever. My special talent is being allergic to everything floating in the air. I’m from Jakarta, Indonesia.

Coursework

Princeton Course Guide / Michigan Course Guide

COS 518: Distributed Systems	COS 597: Computer Science for Policy & Law
EECS 482: Operating Systems	EECS 489: Computer Networks
EECS 484: Database Systems	EECS 494: Game Development
EECS 485: Web Systems	EECS 498: Election Cybersecurity
EECS 398: Autonomous Robotics	EECS 388: Computer Security
EECS 370: Computer Architecture	EECS 281: Data Structures & Algorithms

Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia Paper (NDSS’20) / Report Unlike other censoring countries such as China and Iran, very little is known about Russia’s censorship practices. We collaborated with activists and developed new measurement methods to capture the information control ecosystem of Russia. Our work was covered by 80+ news agencies around the world: ABC / NYT / WP / AP / CPJ / Japan / China / Taiwan.
Censored Planet Project Site To protect freedom of speech, there must be a way to independently detect if something has been censored. Our platform uses remote measurement techniques to collect and publish such data, weekly, for more than 150 countries. The platform has detected surreptitious censorship involving Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan.
ISP-Scale DDoS Mitigation Poster (UMich UROP Symposium) Internet service providers are susceptible to DDoS attacks, leading to user downtimes and network congestion. We worked with real-world Internet traffic data, coming from Merit’s 4000 miles of Internet fiber-optic infrastructure, to explore DNS-side DDoS detection and enhance the existing network monitoring software (AMON).
Voting Machine Forensic Analysis Report Wiped voting machines can be found on online shopping platforms such as eBay, possibly to recover some election costs. We tore apart a used WinVote and iVotronic for forensic analysis. Although we did not discover any groundbreaking security flaws, this phenomenon remains deeply concerning. Covered in UMich News.