Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Overview

The Cybersecurity group at Oregon State develops tools and techniques to protect sensitive data & infrastructure against malicious attacks. We study problems that arise as a result of computation & 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 & 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

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

Faculty

Houssam Abbas
Design, control and verification of cyber-physical systems

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
Mobile computing; wireless networking; network management; distributed systems; cognitive networks; multiagent systems

Yeongjin Jang
Secure systems; trustworthy computing; vulnerability discovery and analysis; developing exploit primitives; jailbreaking; side-channel attack; autonomous cyber attack and defense; malware

Dave Nevin
Regulatory compliance; policy; incident response; security operations; computer forensics; disaster recovery and business continuity

Mike Rosulek
Cryptography; secure multi-party computation

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