Faculty
Patrick McDaniel is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and
Engineering Department at the Pennsylvania State University and
co-director of the Systems and Internet Infrastructure Security
Laboratory. Patrick's research efforts centrally focus on network,
telecommunications, and systems security, language-based security, and
technical and public policy issues in digital media. Patrick was awarded
the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and has chaired several top
conferences in security including, among others, the 2007 and 2008 IEEE
Symposium on Security and Privacy and the 2005 USENIX Security
Symposium. Patrick is the editor-in-chief of the ACM Journal
Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), and serves as associate
editor of the journals ACM Transactions on Information and System
Security and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Prior to
pursuing his Ph.D. in 1996 at the University of Michigan, Patrick was a
software architect and program manager in the telecommunications industry.
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Trent Jaeger is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and
Engineering Department at the Pennsylvania State University and
director of the Systems and Internet Infrastructure Security
Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in
1997 where he studied mechanisms and policies for controlling the
execution of mobile code. Prior to joining Penn State, Trent was a
research staff member in the Security and Networking Department at IBM
Research in the T. J. Watson Research Center.
Trent has interests in the security mechanisms and policies of
operating systems, as well as an interest in source code analysis for
improving security. Trent has been an active member of the Linux
community, including the contribution of code to the Linux Security
Modules (LSM) framework for mandatory access control, tools for
testing the correctness of the LSM framework prior to its inclusion in
Linux 2.6, and techniques for policy and source code analysis for the
SELinux community. Trent's current goals are to build tools that
enable practical retrofitting of a variety of security functions in
programs and the development of a distributed, trusted reference
monitor that enables coherent security controls across distributed
systems. Trent has participated in the program committees of several
major security conferences, and has been the Program and General Chair
of the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies
(SACMAT) in 2001 and 2004, respectively, and Program Chair of the ACM
Conference on Communications Security (Industry Track) in 2003.
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Adam Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer
Science. He completed his B.Sc. at McGill University and his S.M. and
Ph.D. at M.I.T. under the supervision of Madhu Sudan. His research
focuses on cryptography and its connections with information theory,
statistics, and coding theory. Most recently he has been working on
protocols for handling noisy keys in cryptography, such as those based
on biometrics, and on privacy-preserving methods for publishing
aggregate statistical data.
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Sencun Zhu is an Assistant Professor in Department of Computer Science and
Engineering and School of Information Sciences and Technology. He
received the B.S. degree in Precision Instruments from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 1996 and the M.S. degree in Signal Processing from
University of Science and Technology of China, Graduate School at Beijing,
in 1999. He received the PhD degree in Information Technology from George
Mason University in 2004.
Sencun Zhu's research interests include network and systems security, ad-
hoc and sensor networks, performance evaluation, peer-to-peer computing.
Currently he is working on issues related to key management, ad hoc and
sensor network security, DDoS attack prevention, and Worm detection.
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Boniface Hicks is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of
Computing and Information Science at St. Vincent College.
He completed his Ph.D. at Penn State as a member of the SIIS Lab.
His research focuses on building secure systems using security-typed
languages. He continues to collaborate with Professors McDaniel and
Jaeger on the FlowwolF project, developing an end-to-end (Server
to Browser window) solution for strong information flow guarantees
in a web system. Boniface has led work on the
Jifclipse,
JPmail, and
Jif/SELinux projects.
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Lead Graduate Student
Kevin Butler is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and
Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his
M.S. in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 2003 and
his B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Queen's University at
Kingston, Ontario, in 1999. He is a past recipient of a University Graduate
Fellowship as well as the C. Norwood Wherry
Graduate Fellowship in Engineering at Penn State.
Kevin has previously worked as a network operator at UUNET Canada in
Toronto, Ontario, and as a research scientist in the Applied Research
group at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore) in Morristown, NJ.
He completed an extended internship in the Secure Systems Group at
AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, NJ, working on efficient
cryptographic constructions to secure Internet routing with Dr. Patrick
McDaniel, now his advisor at Penn State.
Kevin's research primarily focusses on systems and storage security.
He has also closely examined security and policy considerations for
interdomain routing, and has investigated issues in secure hardware,
privacy, and worm propagation across the Internet and in wireless
networks. Kevin has served on numerous program and organizing
committees for conferences and workshops, and is the Submissions
Chair for the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
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Graduate Students

Note: Given the large number of
applicants, the laboratory must defer all admissions issues to the
department of Computer Science and
Engineering. Hence, if you are a student looking to be admitted
to Penn State University, contact the department directly. If you are
already a student at Penn State and wish to participate in SIIS
research, please contact Professor McDaniel.
PhD Students
William Enck is currently a PhD candidate in the department of Computer
Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. In May of
2004 he received his BS with highest distinction and honors in Computer
Engineering from Penn State. During his undergraduate studies, he
investigated NoC architectures and interned at IBM Corp. in
Poughkeepsie, NY, where he aided in the development of mainframe
processors. In fall of 2004, William was re-enrolled at Penn State for
graduate studies. Switching from hardware design to systems security
research, he quickly received international recognition for his
investigation of vulnerabilities in SMS-capable cellular networks. This
work became the foundation of his thesis, for which he received a
Masters of Science degree in May of 2006.
William remains at Penn State in pursuit of a doctoral degree. He spent
the summer of 2006 on internship with AT&T Research at Shannon Labs
in Florham Park, NJ aiding in the research and development of a network
management tool for automatic router configuration. He is currently
continuing telecommunications security research as well as investigating
other areas of systems and network security.
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Hung-Yuan Hsu is currently a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his
M.S. in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan
University, Taipei, in 1999 and his B.S. in Computer and Information Science
from National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1997. He also
received a Tech. degree in Chemical Engineering from National Taipei
Institute of Technology in 1993.
Hung-Yuan's research interests mainly lie in the realm of network security.
His master's thesis is developing a group oriented multi-digital signature
scheme. During obligatory military service, he was responsible for
managing a
firewall to protect a sensitive website. His current research focuses on
resisting DoS attacks in mobile ad hoc networks. He completed a summer
internship at Treasure Network Inc., Palo Alto, in 2004 and exclusively
received a recommendation letter from the project manager. He has been a
member of the SIIS Lab since September 2005.
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Dave King has been a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering since Fall 2003, and a PhD candidate since Fall 2004. He
graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in Spring 2003 with dual degrees in Computer Science
and Mathematics. He is a past recipient of a Lockheed Martin Graduate
Fellowship.
Dave's work focuses on security at the language level; specifically,
adding security guarantees to legacy code. His research has connections
with programming languages, software engineering, and operating system
security.
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Stephen McLaughlin joined the SIIS lab in Fall 2007 and the PhD program
at The Pennsylvania State University in Spring 2008. He received his BS
in computer science and a minor in mathematics from The Pennsylvania
State University in 2007. He is interested the security applications of
novel storage technologies.
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Thomas Moyer is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science
and Enginering at Penn State. He is completing his MS thesis and will
continue with his PhD. Thomas received his BS in Computer Engineering
from Penn State in Spring 2006. During the summer of 2007, he interned
at AT&T Research at Shannon Labs in Florham Park, NJ, where he aided in
the design and development of an automated tool for router
configuration. His current work is in virtual machine security.
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Divya Muthukumaran is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering and a member of the SIIS Laboratory. She
graduated with distinction from Anna University in India with a BE in
Computer Science and Engineering. She was employed with Tata Consultancy
services as an Assistant Systems Engineer prior to pursuing graduate
studies at PSU. She is currently working on Mobile phone system
security.
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Machigar Ongtang is a PhD candidate in the department of Computer
Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. She
graduated from Mahidol University, Thailand with B.Eng. in Computer
Engineering with first class honors. In September 2004, she received her
M.Sc. with Distinction from the University of Warwick, UK. Machigar
entered the PhD program at Penn State in Spring 2006. Her initial
research focused on mobile database, transaction management, and mobile
agents paradigm.
Machigar joined the SIIS laboratory in Spring 2008. She is now exploring
the area of pervasive storage, context-aware security, and the security
of telecommunication networks.
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Sandra has her BS and MS degrees
from Los Andes University (Bogotá, Colombia).
During her studies she worked on projects that studied the
client/server and multi-agent models in detail. After
graduating, Sandra worked in the areas of networks and IT
management. A couple of years ago she went back to Los Andes as
an Instructor and became interested in computer and network
security and decided to pursue a Ph.D. Sandra then came to Penn
State sponsored by the Fulbright Commission.
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Josh Schiffman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering. He is also a member of the SIIS
Laboratory. He graduated with honors from The Pennsylvania
State University with a BS in Computer Science and minors in
Mathematics and Japanese Language. His undergraduate research
was in spatial database queries, but now focuses on system
security and trusted computing.
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Luke St.Clair is a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering
at Pennsylvania State University. He graduated in December 2004
with Honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(UIUC) with a BS from the School
of Engineering in Computer
Science and a Mathematics minor. He is currently a member of
the SIIS Lab,
and holds the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate
(NDSEG) Fellowship
Currently, he is investigating interesting new uses for OS
Virtualization technologies like Xen. He is primarily interested in
the security issues of these new uses. Additionally, much of his work
revolves around policy enforcement systems (such as SELinux) and how
those systems apply to OS and virtualization technologies.
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Patrick Traynor, currently a PhD candidate in the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, received his BS in Computer Science
from the University of Richmond in May of 2002 and his MS in Computer
Science and Engineering from Penn State in May of 2004. He is currently
a member of the SIIS lab and the
Networking and Security Research Center.
Patrick's research is primarily focused on the security of
telecommunications networks, especially concerning
interconnections between such systems and the larger
Internet. He has also examined issues in systems security,
applied cryptography and mobile/wireless networks. In addition
to publishing in the top security and mobile systems
conferences, Patrick's work has also been covered by the New
York Times. Patrick has also served as a program committee
member for a number of conferences and workshops.
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Xinran is a doctoral student in Computer Science and Engineering at
the Pennsylvania State University. He received his M.E. and
B.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 2001 and 1998, respectively. Prior to joining
Penn State, Xinran worked as a software engineer for IBM's China
Software Development Lab from 2003 to 2004 and Asiainfo from 2001 to
2003.
Xinran's research interests include software security, wireless network
security and system security.
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Liang Xie received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering
from Soochow University, China in 1993. Before joining PSU in 2004,
he had been working in telecommunication companies as a software
engineer and team manager for more than 10 years. Liang Xie's
previous employers were China Telecom, Nokia Networks and Huawei
Technologies.
Liang's work was focused on communication protocols and system
architectures in both wired and wireless networks. Currently he is a
Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering at PSU and also a member in both the SIIS lab and the
NSRC center. His current research focuses on security issues in
various types of computer networks, including P2P and Overlay
Network Security, Ad-hoc and Sensor Network Security, Operating
System Security, DDoS Attack Prevention, Worm Detection, and Secure
Routing Algorithms.
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Yi Yang is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. She
received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Central China
Normal University in 2000 and 2003, respectively. She is interested
in networking and network security. Her current research focuses on
sensor network security.
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Masters Students
Alumni
- Boniface Hicks - Ph.D., Summer 2007, currently an Assistant
Professor at St. Vincent College
- Sunam Ryu - M.S., Spring 2007
- Dhananjay Bapat - M.S. EE, Fall 2006
- Jennifer Plasterr - M.Eng., Summer 2006
- Wesam Lootah - M.S., Spring 2006
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