Home

Apply to participate in my group:

To apply to do independent study or be a member of the research team in my group, fill out the form below, and drop me an email. I am happy to work with both undergraduate and graduate students. Postdocs may also be available.

• Apply for a position

Research Interests:

• Security and privacy, cyber-physical systems, computer-supported cooperative work, distributed systems.

Bio:

• My CV

Research in the News

• IoT Security
  • UM: Smart home’ security flaws found in popular system
  • The Verge
  • Wired
• Financial web site security
  • Read what others are saying about our earlier research on online security at financial web sites

Research Group Web Site:

• Group Web Page for Security of Internet of Things

Publications

• My publications at DBLP
• (Out of date) In reverse chronological order…

IoT Security Research

See this page for research in our group on IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems. Some recent work includes research on adversarial machine learning (CVPR 2008), defense mechanisms to make OAuth tokens at trigger-action cloud services such as IFTTT less risky (NDSS 2018), security analysis of SmartThings IoT application platform (IEEE S&P 2016), and ContexIoT, an automatic IoT app patching mechanism to help enforce context-based permissions (NDSS 2017). .

Data Privacy Research

• With Facebook privacy issues in the news, revisit our 2008 CSCW paper that warned of some of the risks of access to social network data and also outlined some defense strategies: Social Networks and Context-Aware Spam
• FlowFence paper (Usenix Security 2016) that proposes the Quarantined Modules mechanism for permitting safer computing on flow-sensitive data on hubs or servers:
  • Earlence Fernandes, Justin Paupore, Amir Rahmati, Daniel Simionato, Mauro Conti, and Atul Prakash FlowFence: Practical Data Protection for Emerging IoT Application Frameworks. In Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2016. [link]
• Heimdall paper (Mobisys 2017) that proposes a privacy-respecting mechanism for enabling recommendation systems:
  • Amir Rahmati, Earlence Fernandes, Kevin Eykholt, Xinheng Chen, and Atul Prakash, Heimdall: A Privacy-Respecting Implicit Preference Collection Framework, Proc. 15th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (ACM MobiSys 2017), June 2017. [link]

Recent and Current Graduate Students

• Earlence Fernandes. Now postdoc at U. of Washington
• Amir Rahmati. Will be joining CS Department, Stony Brook University as Assistant Professor
• Kevin Eykholt. Current graduate student working on database security and on adversarial machine learning
• Harvey (Hao) Lu. Student since Fall 2017.

Earlier Ph.D. Students

• Beng Heng Ng (Ph.D. 2013) Govt. of Singapore
• Kevin Borders (Ph.D. 2009). Founder: Collage.com and consultant in the area of computer security.
• Xin Zhao (Ph.D. 2007). Software Engineer, Google.
• Lukasz Opyrchal (Ph.D. 2004). Software Engineer, Google.
• Radu Litiu (Ph.D. 2001). Senior software engineer and architect. Limelight Networks.
• Patrick McDaniel  (PhD: 2001); Professor, Computer Science, Pennsylvania State University.
• Amit Mathur  ( PhD: 2001) CEO, Vector Brook, Pune, India
• Jang Ho Lee, Ph.D, 1999. Professor, Information and Computer Engineering, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea
• Hyongsop Shim, Ph.D., 1999, Senior Scientist, Applied Communication Sciences.
• Nelson Manohar, Ph.D. 1997. Entrepreneur
• Trent Jaeger; Ph.D. 1997, Professor, Computer Science, Penn State University.
• Santanu Paul, Ph.D. 1995, Software Engineering. CEO, TalentSprint, India.
• Ratib Al-Zoubi, Ph.D. 1992.