The Secure, Private Internet Research Group (SPIN)
Welcome to the SPIN research group!
Our goal is to make Internet communications secure and private.
Towards this, we analyze the security and privacy provided by existing network protocols, tools, and services,
based on which we propose design adjustments to regain users' security and privacy, or devise clean-slate Internet communication tools.
Our work combines the development of practical systems with rigorous theoretical analysis and incorporates techniques from various
disciplines such as computer networking, cryptography, and statistics. Particular problems we have explored in the past include
Internet censorship resistance, network traffic analysis, network situational awareness, social network malware,
mobile security, and multimedia information hiding.
Active Research Topics
We always strive to explore emerging, impactful research problems in the area of security and privacy. The following are our active research topics:
- Privacy-enhancing technologies
- Adversarial machine learning
- Network traffic analysis
- Privacy in next-generation networks
- Covert communications
- IoT and location privacy
Members
Faculty:
PhD Students:
- Alireza Bahramali (2017-now)
- Ardavan Bozorgi (2019-now)
- Jade Sheffey (2020-now)
- Shreyas Kulkarni (2021-now)
- Ali Zohaib (2021-now)
- Ali Naseh (2021-now)
- Dzung Pham (2022-now)
- Yuefeng Peng (2022-now)
- Dayeon Kang (2023-now)
- Jaechul Roh (2023-now)
- Hyejun Jeong (2023-now) [co-adivsed with Shiqing Ma]
- Mohammadreza Teymoorianfard (2023-now) [co-adivsed with Shiqing Ma]
Alumni:
- Virat Shejwalkar (PhD, 2023)-> Google
- Hamid Mozaffari (PhD, 2023) -> Oracle Labs
- Milad Nasr (PhD, 2022) -> Google Research
- Fatemeh Rezaei (PhD, 2021) -> Snap
- Amirhossein Ghafari (MSc, 2021) -> NVIDIA
- Hadi Zolfaghari (MSc, 2018) -> Google
- Undergraduate Students: Kevin Feveck (Honors Thesis, 2015), John Holowczak (2014-2015), Derek Costigan (Honors Thesis, 2016), Joseph Lew (Honors Thesis, 2017), John Geenty (Honors Thesis, 2018), Yudong Diao (Honors Thesis, 2019), Matthew Hickey (Honors Thesis, 2019), Milo Cason-Snow (Honors Thesis, 2020), Jonah O'Brien Weiss (Honors Thesis, 2021)
- Scholarship-for-Service Advisees: Cassian Corey (2016-2017), Adin Egid (2016-2017), Nick Merlino (2017-2018), Jiyanyi Huang (2017-2019)
- Masters Students: Paras Doshi (2015), Rufina Chettiar (2015), Shreyas Mishra (2019)
Software/Code
Most of our open source projects are available on
SPIN's GitHub repository.
Also, we host some network data traces on
UMass Trace Repository
Other code:
Selected Media Coverage