Welcome

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I lead the Secure & Transparent Systems Laboratory. My research confronts a broad array of issues in computer security. I am especially interested in the challenges of detecting, investigating, and preventing intrusions in various computing environments such as operating systems, organizations, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. Increasingly, my work investigates and addresses the concerns of the users that interact with these systems.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Florida, where I was advised by Professor Kevin Butler and a founding graduate student of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity. My dissertation work was in the area of data provenance, particularly the construction of secure provenance-aware systems. I obtained my M.Sc in Computer Science at the University of Oregon, and bachelors degrees in Computer Science and English Literature from the University of Maryland.

Recent News

28 September, 2022
Our ESORICS'22 work on "Equivocal URLs" was just recognized with the Best Paper Award! Congrats to lead author Joshua Reynolds!

23 August, 2022
Professor Bates joined Illinois Public Media's "The 21st" public radio talk show to discuss the group's recent work on privacy in fitness and health tracking apps! You can listen here: https://will.illinois.edu/21stshow/story/how-private-is-your-health-tracking-app-data.

23 July, 2022
Continuing our lab's 2022 European Tour, we just had two papers accepted at the 27th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'22):

Towards Efficient Auditing for Real-Time Systems
Equivocal URLs: Understanding the Fragmented Space of URL Parser Implementations

Special congratulations to our student authors, Ayoosh Bansal and Anant Kandikuppa (RTS) and Joshua Reynolds (URL).

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