Thea Rossman

I am a second-year PhD student at Stanford University advised by Zakir Durumeric in the Empirical Security Research Group.

I am broadly interested in building practical systems that help operators, researchers, and end-users understand, in order to strengthen, modern networks. I care about the Internet (L3-L7) as it impacts real people. Before starting my PhD, I worked on hypervisor networking at VMWare (Broadcom) and completed my M.S. at Stanford, also advised by Zakir Durumeric.

Publications

^*Indicates co-first authorship ^†Indicates mentee

Iris: Expressive Traffic Analysis for the Modern Internet
Thea Rossman, Diana Qing^†, Gerry Wan, Zakir Durumeric
USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) 2026
To appear

Internet Connection-Splitting: What’s Old is New Again
Gina Yuan, Thea Rossman, Keith Winstein
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) 2025

Tighten Rust’s Belt: Shrinking Embedded Rust Binaries
Hudson Ayers, Evan Laufer, Paul Mure, Jaehyeon Park, Eduardo Rodelo, Thea Rossman, Andrey Pronin, Philip Levis, Johnathan Van Why
Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES) 2022

Works In Progress

In-Network Retransmissions for Encrypted Transport Protocols
Gina Yuan^*, Thea Rossman^*, Keith Winstein
In submission

[Patent] Health-Aware Packet Forwarding
Patent pending (Broadcom Inc.)

Teaching

Primary Instructor (Stanford University):

• CS 110L: Safety in Systems Programming, Winter 2022

Teaching Assistant (Stanford University):

• CS155: Computer and Network Security, Spring 2022
• CS144: Computer and Network Security, Fall 2021
• CS110: Principles of Computer Systems, Winter–Summer 2021

Section Leader (Stanford University):

• CS106A: Programming Methodology, Spring–Summer 2020
• CS106B: Programming Abstractions, Fall 2020