People

Project Lead
Project Director
Principal Investigators
Post-Docs
Students

Project Lead

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Ran Canetti, Project Lead
Boston University

Ran Canetti is the lead principal investigator on MACS: A Modular Approach to Cloud Security. He is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University and the director of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security (RISCS). Canetti’s research interests span multiple aspects of cryptography and information security, with emphasis on the design, analysis and use of cryptographic protocols. He is a fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and an associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation. Previously, Canetti was a researcher at IBM Watson Research Center, a research scientist at MIT, and a professor at Tel Aviv University. Canetti received his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Project Director

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Mayank Varia, Project Research Director
Boston University 

Mayank Varia is the Director for the MACS project. His research interests span theoretical and applied cryptography and their application to problems throughout computer science. Previously, he worked for four years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he designed and evaluated high performance privacy-enhancing data search technology, created information theoretic metrics to quantify privacy, and developed algorithms to capture linguistic provenance automatically. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT for his work on program obfuscation.

Principal Investigators

Jonathan Appavoo

Jonathan Appavoo
Boston University

Jonathan Appavoo is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Boston University.  His research focus is on architectures for scalable, elastic systems that enable large-scale on-demand computing.  Prior to Joining BU in 2009, Jonathan was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research in New York.  He graduated with his PhD in 2006 from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor Michael Stumm.

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Azer Bestavros
Boston University

Azer Bestavros is a professor and the former chair of the Computer Science Department at Boston University, which he joined in 1991 after completing his PhD at Harvard University. His research contributions in the broad areas of networking and distributed systems include pioneering the web push content distribution model; seminal work on Internet traffic characterization; game-theoretic approaches to cloud resource management; and safety certification of networked systems and software. This work yielded 17 PhD theses, six issued patents, three start-ups, and hundreds of refereed papers that are cited over 13,000 times. He is the founding director of the BU Hariri Institute for Computing, which was set up to “create and sustain a community of scholars who believe in the transformative potential of computational perspectives in research and education.” He serves as a member of the Research, Education, and Outreach Committee of the MGHPCC, and as a board member of the Cloud Computing Caucus, a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of industry and key government stakeholders.  He has received a number of distinguished service awards and best papers awards, most notably the ACM Sigmetrics Inaugural Test of Time Award.

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Srini Devadas
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Srini Devadas is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his MS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 and 1988, respectively. He joined MIT in 1988 and served as Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with responsibility for Computer Science, from 2005 to 2011.

Devadas’ research interests span Computer-Aided Design (CAD), computer security and computer architecture and he has received significant awards from each discipline. In CAD, his work on logic synthesis and power estimation resulted in several best paper awards at the Design Automation Conference and in IEEE Transactions. Devadas was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999 for contributions to design automation. He received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award in 2014 for inventing Physical Unclonable Functions and single-chip secure processor architectures. Devadas’ work on hardware information flow tracking published in the 2004 ASPLOS received the ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award in 2014. His papers on analytical cache modeling and Aegis, a single-chip secure processor were included as influential papers in “25 Years of the International Conference on Supercomputing.”

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Marten van Dijk
University of Connecticut

Marten van Dijk has over 10 years research experience in system security both in academia and industry. He worked for two and a half years at RSA Laboratories in cybersecurity. Prior to RSA he was a research scientist at MIT CSAIL working collaboratively with Professor Srini Devadas with an emphasis on processor architectures that offer strong security guarantees; most notably, this collaboration led to the design of Aegis, the first single-chip secure processor that verifies integrity and freshness of external memory. This also led to the  introduction of the first circuit realizations of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) resulting in a commercialization by Verayo and Intrinsic-ID. His work received the NYU-Poly AT&T Best Applied Security Paper Award, 3rd place, 2012, and the ACSAC’02 outstanding student paper award. Prior to working in system security he was a research scientist at the digital signal processing group at Philips Research, where he became the lead inventor of the error correcting codes used in Blu-ray disc. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics, a M.S. in Mathematics, and a M.S. in Computer Science from Eindhoven University of Technology.

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Sharon Goldberg
Boston University

Sharon Goldberg pursues research at the nexus of security, cryptography, and networking. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2009, and her B.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 2003, has worked as a researcher at IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft, and as an engineer at Bell Canada and Hydro One Networks; and has served on working groups of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); and most recently was awarded the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize for 2014.  In February 2014, Sharon was selected as one of 126 Alfred P. Sloan scholars. Sharon joined the BU Computer Science Department in 2010 and was named a Hariri Junior Fellow in 2012.

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Shafi Goldwasser
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Shafi Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is also a professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Goldwasser received a BS degree in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984.

Goldwasser was the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993, and another in 2001, for her work on interactive proofs and connections to approximation. She was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award, the RSA award in mathematics, the ACM Athena award for women in computer science, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore award, and the ACM Turing Award for 2012. She is a member of the AAAS, NAS, and NAE.

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Frans Kaashoek
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Frans Kaashoek is a professor at MIT, where he co-leads the parallel and distributed operating systems group (http://www.pdos.csail.mit.edu/). Kaashoek is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award and the 2010 ACM-Infosys Foundation award. He is cofounder of Sightpath, Inc. and Mazu Networks, Inc.

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George Kollios
Boston University

George Kollios is a professor in the  Computer Science Department at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1995 from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and the M.Sc.  and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Polytechnic University, New York in  1998 and 2000 respectively. His research interests include temporal and spatio-temporal indexing, data mining, database security, multimedia indexing, and approximation algorithms for large scale data management problems. His research has been supported by NSF, including an NSF CAREER Award, and IARPA. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society.

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Orran Krieger
Boston University

Orran Krieger founded the Center for Cloud Innovation in the Spring of 2013. He is a Resident Fellow of the Hariri Institute and a Professor of the Practice at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. Current projects include the Massachusetts Open Cloud, and EbbRT, a new operating system for cloud computing.  His previous work includes vCloud at VMware, and leading the Advanced Operating Systems Research Department at IBM.

mountain_meDaniel Wichs
Northeastern University

Daniel Wichs, a professor at Northeastern University, focuses on modern cryptography, and his research interests also include computer and network security. His recent research relates to leakage resilience cryptography, which involves preventing hackers from gaining useful information from devices. He is also examining the security and integrity of data stored on the cloud rather than a private computer or network. Before joining the Northeastern faculty, Professor Wichs earned his PhD in Computer Science at New York University in 2011 and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the IBM Research T.J. Watson Center.

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Vinod Vaikuntanathan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science at MIT. His main research interest is in the theory and practice of Cryptography. He has played a prominent role in the development of lattice-based cryptography, building advanced cryptographic primitives using integer lattices; leakage-resilient cryptography, defining and developing algorithms resilient against adversarial information leakage; and more recently, on the theory and practice of computing on encrypted data, constructing powerful objects such as fully homomorphic encryption and functional encryption. Professor Vaikuntanathan is a recipient of the 2008 IBM Josef Raviv Postdoctoral Fellowship, the 2009 George M. Sprowls Award for the best MIT Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science, the 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a 2014 NSF CAREER award and a 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship.

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Nickolai Zeldovich III
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nickolai Zeldovich is an associate professor at MIT’s department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in building practical secure systems, from operating systems and hardware to programming languages and security analysis tools. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008, where he developed HiStar, an operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code by controlling information flow. In 2005, he co-founded MokaFive, a company focused on improving desktop management and mobility using x86 virtualization. Professor Zeldovich received a Sloan fellowship in 2010, an NSF CAREER award in 2011, the MIT EECS Spira teaching award in 2013, and the MIT Edgerton Faculty Achievement award 2014.

Post-Docs

  • Nir Bitansky (2015-), working with Shafi Goldwasser, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Yossi Gilad (2015-), working with Sharon Goldberg, Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Jason Hennessey (2014-), working with Orran Krieger
  • Georgios Kellaris (2015-), working with George Kollios
  • Ranjit Kumaresan (2015-), working with Shafi Goldwasser, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Silas Richelson (2015-), working with Ran Canetti, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Ron Rothblum (2015-), working with Shafi Goldwasser, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Alessandra Scafuro (2014-2016, now at NC State), worked with Ran Canetti, Daniel Wichs
  • Malte Schwarzkopf (2015-), working with Azer Bestavros, Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Mark Zhandry (2015-2016, now at Princeton), worked with Shafi Goldwasser, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Haibin Zhang (2016-), working with Marten van Dijk

Students (current and former)

Graduate students

  • Julian Bangert, advisor: Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Itay Berman, advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • James Cadden, advisor: Jonathan Appavoo
  • Cheng Chan, advisors: Shafi Goldwasser, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Haogang Chen, advisors: Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Yilei Chen, advisor: Ran Canetti
  • Aloni Cohen, advisors: Shafi Goldwasser, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Victor Costan, advisor: Srini Devadas
  • Akshay Degwekar, advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Han Dong, advisor: Jonathan Appavoo
  • Christopher W. Fletcher, advisor: Srini Devadas
  • Wil Koch, advisors: Azer Bestavros, Marten van Dijk
  • Akshay Degwekar, advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Christopher Fletcher, advisors: Srini Devadas, Marten van Dijk
  • Jon Gjengset, advisor: Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Sergey Gorbunov,  advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Syed Kamran Haider, advisor: Marten van Dijk
  • Justin Holmgren, advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Jelle van den Hooff, advisor: Frans Kaashoek
  • Zahra Jafargholi, advisor: Daniel Wichs
  • Chenglu Jin, advisor: Marten van Dijk
  • Alex Konradi, advisor: Frans Kaashoek
  • Albert Kwon, advisors: Srini Devadas, Marten van Dijk
  • David Lazar, advisor: Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Ilia Lebedev, advisor: Srini Devadas
  • Tianren Liu, advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Hoda Maleki, advisor: Marten van Dijk
  • Aanchal Malhotra, advisor: Sharon Goldberg
  • Xianrui Meng, advisor: George Kollios
  • Omer Paneth, advisor: Ran Canetti
  • Sunoo Park, advisor: Shafi Goldwasser
  • Oxana Poburinnaya, advisor: Ran Canetti
  • Reza Rahaeimehr, advisor: Marten van Dijk
  • Ling Ren, advisors: Srini Devadas, Marten van Dijk
  • Dan Schatzberg, advisor: Jonathan Appavoo
  • Sahil Tikale, advisor: Orran Krieger
  • Saeed Valizadeh, advisor: Marten van Dijk
  • Prashant Vasudevan, advisor: Vinod Vaikuntanathan
  • Nikolaj Volgushev, advisor: Azer Bestavros
  • Frank Wang, advisor: Nickolai Zeldovich

Undergraduate students

  • Issac E. Cohen, advisor: Sharon Goldberg
  • Yanni Coroneos, advisor: Frans Kaashoek
  • Andres Erbsen, advisors: Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich
  • Kyle Hogan, advisors: Ran Canetti, Mayank Varia
  • Daniel Ziegler, advisors: Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich