Oliver Hohlfeld

Oliver Hohlfeld is a Professor at the University of Kassel, where he leads the Distributed Systems group. He previously held academic positions at Brandenburg University of Technology and RWTH Aachen University, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on network security, Internet measurements, and Quality of Experience (QoE).

He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at TU Berlin under Anja Feldmann and holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Darmstadt University of Technology. He also worked at Fraunhofer IGD on telemedical network architectures.

His research adopts a data-driven approach, combining large-scale Internet measurements, user studies, and machine learning to understand and improve Internet performance and security. Key areas include DDoS detection, QUIC, HTTP/2, TLS deployment, and BGP analysis. He investigates how protocols like QUIC and HTTP/2 impact user experience and network efficiency, often through empirical studies of real-world deployments.

His recent publications highlight a strong trend in network security and protocol analysis, with significant work on DDoS attacks, traffic ingress detection, and web consolidation. He also explores social media dynamics and censorship circumvention through user reviews.

• 2022 IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize
• Best of CCR (2021) for TLS 1.3 deployment study
• ACM Senior Member (2020)
• IEEE QoMEX 2019 Best Reviewer Award
• ACM IMC Community Contribution Award (2018)

He has advised numerous Master’s and Bachelor’s students, primarily at RWTH Aachen, and has been a principal investigator in major projects such as AIDOS (AI-based DDoS mitigation), DFG SFB MAKI, COMTEX, and the EU-funded SSICLOPS. He actively serves on the technical program committees of top-tier conferences including SIGCOMM, NSDI, IMC, and CoNEXT, and is a frequent reviewer for leading journals in networking and systems.

He leads the Distributed Systems group at the University of Kassel, which conducts research on Internet observability, secure infrastructures, and scalable networking solutions.