
Overview
The Cybersecurity group at Oregon State develops tools and techniques to protect sensitive data and infrastructure against malicious attacks. We study problems that arise as a result of computation and storage in hostile environments. Our work includes adversarial threat modeling, design of novel protection mechanisms, and analysis of their guarantees.
Our faculty members have specific expertise spanning from foundations of cryptography to network security to cyber-physical and IoT system security. For example, we are actively developing techniques for performing computations (database search, data mining) on information while it remains in encrypted form; and strategies to detect and mitigate cyber-attacks on power grids and other infrastructure.

The age of Big Data and cloud computing has created greater demand for advanced cryptography. To store data on the cloud safely it must be encrypted; in order to use the data it needs to be decrypted, at which point it becomes vulnerable to attacks. In this podcast, learn how professors Mike Rosulek and Attila Yavuz are finding new ways to perform operations on encrypted data without leaking critical information.
Sub Areas
- Theoretical & Applied Cryptography
- Network Security
- Security in Outsourced Cloud Settings
- Privacy Enhancing Technologies
- Computing on Encrypted Data
- Cyber-physical Systems Security
- IoT & Distributed Systems Security
- Authentication and Integrity in Critical Systems
- Trustworthy Machine Learning
Related Courses
- CS 175: Communications Security & Social Movements
- CS 370: Introduction to Security
- CS 373: Defense Against the Dark Arts
- CS 419/519: Cyber Attacks and Defenses
- CS 427: Cryptography
- CS/ECE478: Network Security
- CS 519: Cryptographic Protocols
- CS 519: Advanced Systems Security
- CS 578: Cyber-Security
- CS 599: Physical Attacks and Countermeasures
- CS 499/599: Trustworthy Machine Learning (Previously, Machine Learning Security)
Faculty
Houssam Abbas
Design, control and verification of cyber-physical systems; ethics in AI
Rakesh Bobba
Secure protocols; access controls; key management; power grid & other critical infrastructures; cyber-physical systems, cloud computing
Glencora Borradaile
Counter-surveillance; human factors in digital security; graph algorithms; computational geometry
Bechir Hamdaoui
Resilient & intelligent networked systems; network & wireless security; enabling network & communication technologies
Sanghyun Hong
Security, privacy, and machine learning, especially on building secure and reliable AI systems from a systems security perspective
Vincent Immler
Next-generation attacks and defenses in hardware security
Yeongjin Jang
Secure systems; trustworthy computing; vulnerability discovery and analysis; developing exploit primitives; jailbreaking; side-channel attack; autonomous cyber attack and defense; malware
Sibin Mohan
Systems; security; networking; autonomous systems
Dave Nevin
Regulatory compliance; policy; incident response; security operations; computer forensics; disaster recovery and business continuity
Mike Rosulek
Cryptography; secure multi-party computation
Jiayu Xu
Theoretical and practical aspects of cryptography; applications to network security
Affiliated Faculty
J. Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez
Cascading outages in power grids; complex systems & complex networks; chaos & nonlinear dynamics; big data & high performance computing; PMU-supported power system stability monitoring
Tom Dietterich
Machine learning; intelligent systems; intelligent user interfaces; ecosystem informatics
Alan Fern
Artificial intelligence, including machine learning, data mining, and automated planning/control
Jinsub Kim
Statistical signal processing; statistical learning theory; power systems state estimation; security of cyber physical system
Kevin McGrath
Anita Sarma
Coordination and collaboration in distributed teams; configuration management systems; software maintenance and evolution; software visualization; usable security
Weng-Keen Wong
Data mining; machine learning; anomaly detection; human-in-the-loop learning; ecosystem informatics