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 including operating systems, cloud computing, and network communications, as well as both mobile and embedded devices. My recent work has evaluated the safety of mobile applications, introduced mechanisms that defend against USB-based attacks, and designed security-enhanced provenance-aware systems that are capable of reliably tracking and explaining system intrusions.

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.

Note: We are building a world-class security research group at the University of Illinois. If you are a motivated student with an interest in security, I would be interested in speaking with you. Please see the STS Lab's recruitment page for more information.

Recent News

7 December, 2020
Our paper, "Causal Analysis for Software-Defined Networking Attacks," has been accepted to the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (Security'21)! This is the third and final piece of Ben Ujcich's dissertation, all of which appeared in the Top 4 security conferences. Congratulations to Professor Ujcich, who is now in his first year as an Assistant Professor at Georgetown!

8 October, 2020
Pubali Datta has been selected to participate in the 2020 Rising Stars Program! Participants are selected based on academic excellence, interest in a faculty career in the EECS discipline, and commitment to advancing equity and inclusion. This year's event is being hosted virtually by the Berkeley EECS Department. Congrats Pubali!

17 August, 2020
"Three of our papers have been accepted for publication at the 2020 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'20):

This is Why We Can’t Cache Nice Things: Lightning-Fast Threat Hunting using Suspicion-Based Hierarchical Storage
On the Forensic Validity of Approximated Audit Logs
Workflow Integration Alleviates Identity and Access Management in Serverless Computing

Congratulations to our lead student authors: (1) Wajih Ul Hassan, Klaus Zou, Dawei Wang, (2) Noor Michael, Jaron Mink, Jason Liu, Sneha Gaur, (3) Arnav Sankaran, and Pubali Datta!"

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