Technology focused graduate school “Cornell Tech” forms cyber security research team

Cornell Tech has formed one of the world’s leading research groups specializing in cybersecurity, privacy and cryptography. The four scientists in the group are known for their influence on industry, nonprofit and government practice, as well as for their highly cited, award-winning research. Their work spans data encryption, cryptography, cryptocurrency, machine-learning and Internet of Things privacy and security. To a degree unusual for an academic-based research team, the Cornell Tech Security Group (CTSG) will consult regularly with industry practitioners to drive and inform best practices and the group’s research.

“Cybersecurity touches nearly every aspect of our daily lives, from consumer privacy to the security of corporations and governments and, increasingly, to criminal investigations,” said Cornell Tech Dean Dan Huttenlocher. “The Cornell Tech Security Group brings together four of the world’s leading cybersecurity experts as they identify new vulnerabilities and advance the state of the art in modern security.”

Team members’ current efforts include “Honey Encryption,” the use of decoys and deception to make encrypted data harder to access even if stolen; keeping enterprise-setting passwords secure in the event of a system breach; design of a secure anonymous survey system; and development of a system to preserve privacy in deep learning, particularly when applied to sensitive data.

Members of the CTSG:

• Ari Juels is a co-director of IC3 (Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts), based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, where he is also a professor. He was previously the chief scientist of RSA, the security division of EMC, the leading provider of intelligence-driven security solutions.
• Rafael Pass is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech. His research focuses on cryptography and game theory and their interplay with computational complexity. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award and the Google Faculty Award.
• Thomas Ristenpart is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech. His recent research focuses on new threats to, and improved opportunities for, cloud computing security, as well as topics in applied and theoretical cryptography.
• Vitaly Shmatikov is a professor of computer science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech. His research areas are security and privacy. He received the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies in 2008 and 2014. Shmatikov’s research group won the Best Practical Paper or Best Student Paper Awards at the 2012, 2013 and 2014 IEEE Symposiums on Security and Privacy