Welcome to the web page for security and cryptography research in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California at San Diego. Our group conducts research in areas spanning from theory to practice: we work on the theoretical foundations of cryptography; the development and analysis of cryptographic protocols and algorithms; and on applied cryptography, systems security, and network security. In line with our broad security-related research interests, we are affiliated and actively collaborate with the Theory Group, Programming Systems and the Systems and Networking Group here at UCSD.
| People | News | Publications | Sponsors |
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kc claffy Kamalika Chaudhuri Christian Dameff Ranjit Jhala |
Ryan Kastner Sorin Lerner Nadia Polikarpova Steven Swanson |
Dean Tullsen Yiying Zhang Yuanyuan Zhou |
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Cindy Moore |
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Alexis Morales Flores |
Eugene Lau |
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Ben Du (Ph.D. 2025)
→ UCLA postdoc |
Leo Cao (M.S. 2024)
→ University of Wisconsin Ph.D. program
Annie Dai (B.S. 2023)
→ University of Maryland Ph.D. program
Doreen Riepel (postdoc 2023-2024)
→ CISPA |
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March 24— Much congrats to Nadia Heninger who was named an IACR Fellow "For impactful contributions to the analysis of deployed cryptographic protocols and service to the IACR and the wider security community". Translation: "for breaking everything under the sun." As always, amazing. |
| March 23— Today, Mihir Bellare, along with his co-authors Michel Abdalla and Phillip Rogaway, received the inaugural RSAC Test of Time Award for their 2001 paper "Oracle Diffie-Hellman Assumptions and an Analysis of DHIES". Congrats Mihir! |
| November 13— Congratulations to George Sullivan who successfully defended his thesis today, "Passive Aggressive: Network Attacks via Passive Analysis". Today therefore also marks George's tearful/joyful goodbye to the hygiene server. Congrats George! |
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October 13— Congrats to Wenyi "Morty" Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin, Nadia Heninger and Aaron Schulman for their amazing CCS paper featured in today's Wired Story "Satellites are Leaking the World's Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data"! More information can be found at the project page. |
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August 13— CSE alumni Stephen Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Danny Anderson, along with Brian Kantor, Hovav Shacham, and Stefan Savage at UCSD together with Yoshi Kohno, Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis and Franziska Roesner at UW received the 2025 USENIX Security Test of Time award today for their 2011 paper Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces. This paper, along with its predecessor (which also received the Test-of-time award at IEEE in 2020), is credited with helping to establish the field of modern automotive security. This body of work also received the AAAS Golden Goose Award in 2021. Congratulations to everyone on such an outstanding accomplishment! |
| August 11— Congratulations to Enze "Alex" Liu who defended his dissertation today, entitled "Security Vulnerabilities in Service Composition"! Alex has been a cornerstone of the sysnetsec groups, promoting community within the department, supporting and guiding many other students, and blazing trails with his research. Dr. Liu soon transitions to CMU as a postdoc. Congrats, Alex! |
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June 09— Congrats to Keegan Ryan, award-winning storyteller, for defending his dissertation, "Practical Lattice-based Algorithms for Cryptanalysis"! |
| June 04— Congrats to Evan Johnson for defending his dissertation, "Verifiably Secure Software Sandboxing"! Evan came to us from Illinois, refined his inner chill over six years here in SoCal, and is now off to try the other coast as an Asst Professor at NYU. Congrats and good luck Evan! |
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Lost in Translation: Text Message Spoofing via Email, , Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2026. (Distinguished Paper Award).
Understanding Server-side Commercial Fingerprinting, , Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Dubai, UAE, May 2026.
TickTock: Verified Isolation in a Production Embedded OS, , Proceedings of the 31st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Seoul, Republic of Korea, October 2025.
Don’t Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEOSatellites, , Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Taipei, Taiwan, October 2025. (Distinguished Paper Award).
Local Frames: Exploiting Inherited Origins to Bypass Content Blockers, , Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Taipei, Taiwan, October 2025.
Canvassing the Fingerprinters: Characterizing Canvas Fingerprinting Use Across the Web, , Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Madison, Wisconsin, October 2025.
Somesite I Used To Crawl: Awareness, Agency and Efficacy in Protecting Content Creators From AI Crawlers, , Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Madison, Wisconsin, October 2025.
No Key, No Problem: Vulnerabilities in Master Lock Smart Locks, , Proceedings of the USENIX WOOT Conference on Offensive Technologies (WOOT), Seattle, WA, August 2025.
Characterizing the MrDeepFakes Sexual Deepfake Marketplace, , Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Seattle, WA, August 2025.
Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage, , JAMA Network Open 8(7):e2530226-e2530226, July 2025.
From Scarcity to Opportunity: Examining Abuse of the IPv4 Leasing Market, , Proceedings of the 6th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA), June 2025.
 CalIT(2) |
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