FACULTY AT CISPA

Security research in today’s interconnected world has so many different challenges. I am particularly excited about making complex security and privacy mechanisms more human-friendly.

We are trying to determine ways to ascertain that current and future systems are secure. To achieve this, we develop analysis frameworks, methodologies, and tools. These enable us to identify attacks and propose more secure solutions.

My group researches novel classes of vulnerabilities in Web applications and builds tools to detect and mitigate them. In addition, we investigate how to best notify affected sites about the vulnerabilities we found. This way, our insights do not only serve us, but can help administrators close their security holes, impacting the overall security of the Web.

Mobile devices can pose severe privacy threats but at the same time offer with their particular setting great opportunities to create more secure systems that put the users back into control over their data. In our research, we take this opportunity and improve mobile system security from hardware primitives to middleware design to the user's central role in the data protection.

Our research explores the boundaries of what is possible in secure computation: What are the strongest possible security guarantees and strongest functionality we can achieve under the weakest possible assumptions?

I see Cyber-Physical Systems as the new frontier of cybersecurity: my goal is to understand threats & defenses based on interactions between physical and digital systems, and to translate cybersecurity principles to engineered systems.

Our society regularly faces devastating and largely anonymous cyber attacks. We explore automated, reliable, and accurate methods to identify the origin of cyber attacks -- an important step to hold anonymous attackers responsible for their action.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offer great benefits to industry and society in general. While we are advancing the state of the art of future intelligent systems, we equally seek compliance with our expectations on security, privacy and safety.