SPIN

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.
Faculty
Amir Houmansadr
Associate Professor

PhD Students
Traffic Obfuscation, Anti-censorship, Privacy
Internet Censorship, Traffic Analysis
AI/ML Security and Privacy

AI/ML Security and Privacy
AI/ML Security and Privacy
Trustworthy AI, Adversarial ML
Traffic Analysis, Network Security
AI/ML Security and Privacy
Joint with Shiqing Ma
Trustworthy AI and ML, Privacy
Joint with Shiqing Ma
Trustworthy AI and ML, Privacy


PhD Alumni
PhD (2024), Microsoft
PhD (2023), Google
PhD (2023), Oracle Labs
PhD (2022), Deepmind
PhD (2021), Snap

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
  • Trustworhty AI
  • Network traffic analysis
  • Privacy in next-generation networks
  • Covert communications
  • IoT and location privacy

Software/Code

Selected Media Coverage