UMD Science of Security Lablet Research Initiative

UMD'S SCIENCE OF SECURITY LABLET INITIATIVE

The UMD lablet leverages the resources of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center to bring together 15 University of Maryland faculty from five different departments across campus, in collaboration with 6 external faculty members from other universities, to focus on developing the scientific foundations for cybersecurity. Our lablet has particular strengths in understanding the role of human behavior in relation to cybersecurity, from the perspectives of both cyberattackers as well as legitimate users; in developing theoretical foundations and mathematical models for cybersecurity; and in carrying out empirical studies to measure, characterize, and better understand both existing cybersecurity threats and the effectiveness of current defenses.
 

LEAD PI

Jonathan Katz is the director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, as well as a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland with a joint appointment in UMIACS. He received undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from MIT in 1996, and a PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2002. He has held visiting appointments at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris, France), and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY). He was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group from 2009-2011.

Prof. Katz's research interests lie broadly in the areas of cryptography, computer and network security, and science of cybersecurity, with his most recent work focusing on secure multi-party computation, statistical data privacy, and research at the intersection of programming-language security and cryptography. He has published over 100 refereed articles, and has co-authored the widely used undergraduate textbook "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" (CRC Press, 2007) as well as a monograph on digital signature schemes (Springer, 2010).
 

CO-PI

Michel Cukier is the director for the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES) and the associate director for education for the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. He also an associate professor of reliability engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.  His research covers dependability and security issues. His latest research focuses on the empirical quantification of cybersecurity. He has published more than 70 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings in those areas.

Cukier is the primary investigator of a National Science Foundation REU Site on cybersecurity in collaboration with Women in Engineering, where more than 85 percent of the participants are female students. He co-advises the UMD Cybersecurity Club, which has a membership of more than 400 students.

He received a degree in physics engineering from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, in 1991, and a doctorate in computer science from the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, France, in 1996. From 1996 to 2001, he was a researcher in the Perform research group in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He joined the University of Maryland in 2001 as an assistant professor.