Email: jsonch < at > princeton.edu
I'm an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, interested in many areas related to networking and distributed systems. I enjoy taking a multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach, where we start by finding the best tools to solve our specific problem. Lately I've been focused on using programming languages, compilers, and verification systems to make programming the network data plane easier and safer.
I’m also passionate about evolving research projects into open source tools that accelerate innovation and lower barriers of entry to novel technology. One example is Lucid, a high-level language for programming terabit-rate P4 switches that I developed with Devon Loehr, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker, Mary Hogan, Andrew Johnson, and others. In the past few years we have evolved Lucid (Github repo) into a platform that has enabled over a dozen interesting research projects at multiple universities, and a bunch of follow up work in our own research groups.
My other recent areas of interest include telemetry, network security, and low-overhead distributed control. I like to think about the intersection of these areas with machine learning, both as an application to support and a tool to use. My PhD dissertation (2020) was on balancing performance and flexibility in telemetry systems, advised by Jonathan M. Smith at The University of Pennsylvania. Some of the other collaborators that I have had the pleasure of working closely with in these areas include Liangcheng Yu, Oliver Michel, Nofel Yaseen, Hyojoon Kim, Vincent Liu, Nik Sultana, Joel Hypolite, Boon Tau Loo, Andre DeHon, Eric Keller, and Adam Aviv.
Automated Optimization of Parameterized Data-Plane Programs with Parasol. Mary Hogan, Devon Loehr, John Sonchack, Shir Landau Feibish, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) 2025.
Beaver: Practical Partial Snapshots for Distributed Cloud Services. Liangcheng Yu, Xiao Zhang, Haoran Zhang, John Sonchack, Dan Ports, and Vincent Liu. OSDI 2024.
SwitchLog: A Logic Programming Language for Network Switches. Vaibhav Mehta, Devon Loehr, John Sonchack, and David Walker. Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages 2023.
Cebinae: Scalable In-Network Fairness Augmentation. Liangcheng Yu, John Sonchack, and Vincent Liu. SIGCOMM 2022.
OrbWeaver: Using IDLE Cycles in Programmable Networks for Opportunistic Coordination. Liangcheng Yu, John Sonchack, and Vincent Liu. NSDI 2022.
Lucid: A Language for Control in the Data Plane. John Sonchack, Devon Loehr, Jennifer Rexford, and David Walker. Sigcomm 2021.
Flightplan: Dataplane Disaggregation and Placement for P4 Programs. Nik Sultana, John Sonchack, Hans Giesen, Isaac Pedisich, Zhaoyang Han, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Shivani Burad, André DeHon, and Boon Thau Loo. NSDI 2021.
Mantis: Reactive Programmable Switches. Liangcheng Yu, John Sonchack, Vincent Liu. Sigcomm 2020.
Balancing Performance and Flexibility in Hybrid Network Telemetry Systems. John Sonchack. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania 2020.
tpprof: A Network Traffic Pattern Profiler. Nofel Yaseen, John Sonchack, Vincent Liu. NSDI 2020.
Ignis: scaling distribution-oblivious systems with light-touch distribution. Nikos Vasilakis, Ben Karel, Yash Palkhiwala, John Sonchack, Andre DeHon, and Jonathan M Smith. PLDI 2019.
TMC: Pay-as-you-Go Distributed Communication. Henri Maxime Demoulin, Nikos Vasilakis, John Sonchack, Isaac Pedisich, Vincent Liu, Boon Thau Loo, Linh Thi Xuan Phan, Jonathan M. Smith, and Irene Zhang. AP-NET 2019.
Synchronized Network Snapshots. Nofel Yaseen, John Sonchack, Vincent Liu. Sigcomm 2018.
In-network Computing to The Rescue of Faulty Links. Hans Geisen, Lei Shi, John Sonchack, Anirudh Chelluri, Nishanth Prabhu, Nik Sultana, Latha Kant, Anthony J. McAuley, Alexander Poylisher, Andre DeHon, Boon Thau Loo. NetCompute 2018.
Scaling Hardware Accelerated Network Monitoring to Concurrent and Dynamic Queries With *Flow. John Sonchack, Oliver Michel, Adam J. Aviv, Eric Keller, Jonathan M. Smith. ATC 2018.
Packet-Level Analytics in Software without Compromises. Oliver Michel, John Sonchack, Adam J. Aviv, Eric Keller, Jonathan M. Smith. Hotcloud 2018.
TurboFlow: Information Rich Flow Record Generation on Commodity Switches. John Sonchack, Adam J. Aviv, Eric Keller, Jonathan M. Smith. EuroSys 2018.
Predictable Packet Processing with PathMiner. John Sonchack and Jonathan M. Smith. BAR 2018.
Enabling Practical SDN Security Applications with OFX (The OpenFlow eXtension Framework). John Sonchack, Adam J. Aviv, Eric Keller, and Jonathan M. Smith. Proceedings of the 2016 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
Timing Based Reconniasance and Defense in Software-defined Networks. John Sonchack, Anurag Dubey, Adam J. Aviv, Eric Keller, and Jonathan M. Smith. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC).
Exploring Large Scale Security System Reproducibility with the LESS Simulator. John Sonchack and Adam J. Aviv. Journal of Computer Security (JCS).
Timing SDN Control Planes to Infer Network Configurations. John Sonchack, Adam J. Aviv, and Eric Keller. Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization (SDN-NFV Sec).
OFX: Enabling OpenFlow Extensions for Switch-Level Security Applications. John Sonchack, Adam J. Aviv, Eric Keller, and Jonathan M. Smith. Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS).
Cross-domain Collaboration for Improved IDS Rule Set Selection. John Sonchack and Adam J. Aviv. Journal of Information Security and Applications 24 (JISA).
LESS Is More: Host-Agent Based Simulator for Large-Scale Evaluation of Security Systems. John Sonchack and Adam J. Aviv. Proceedings of ESORICS 2014.
Bridging the Data Gap: Data Related Challenges in Evaluating Large Scale Collaborative Security Systems. John Sonchack, Adam J. Aviv, and Johnathan M. Smith. In the proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cyber Security Evaluation and Testing (CSET). 2013.
Signature Correlations in Multiple Honeypot Defense System. John Sonchack and Johnathan M. Smith. Future Internet Workshop. 2011