Thursday, February 26 11:50 AM - 12:35 PM
Cowell Hall — 106 - Lecture Hall
The Department of Computer Science will host Bhavin Parekh, a staff software engineer at Google, to give his talk, "Defending at Global Scale: Cloud Armor, DDoS Mitigation, and Balancing Speed With Safety."
About the talk: As web threats continue to escalate, standard defenses are often overwhelmed by volumetric attacks and sophisticated 0-day exploits. Protecting applications globally is no longer just about capacity — it requires mastering the tension between rapid response times and operational safety.
In this session, we will examine Google Cloud Armor’s approach to securing the edge. We will explore how infrastructure designed to protect services like Search and YouTube can help protect against massive threats to Google Cloud. We will look at case studies, including the record-breaking 398M RPS Rapid Reset as well as the React2Shell vulnerability in December 2025
We will also demystify the operational challenges of global security updates, walking through the conflicts between the need for speed and the requirement for safety. We will discuss techniques like progressive rollouts, canarying, and automated health checks, showing how to mitigate risks without causing regressions. Attendees will gain a clear, grounded understanding of how to implement resilient, high-scale defense strategies.