Publications
As our faculty and students work to stay one step ahead of cyber threats, they are also making significant contributions to the body of literature within this field. Below are recent publications from CCS faculty and students that demonstrate the scope of those contributions. We have also included some titles that represent foundational work in the careers of our faculty and in the development of the particular technologies their research supports.
Names in boldface are affiliated with the Center for Cybersecurity, or were at the time the paper was written.
Recent Faculty Publications
All Publications: CCS Google Scholars
2022
An Audit of Facebook’s Political Ad Policy Enforcement
Victor Le Pochat, Laura Edelson, Tom Van Goethem, Wouter Joosen, Damon McCoy, and Tobias Lauinger
To be presented at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, August 2022
Robust Deep Learning for IC Test Problems
Animesh Basak Chowdhury, Benjamin Tan, Siddharth Garg, and Ramesh Karri
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, January 2022
2021
Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions
Hammond Pearce, Baleegh Ahmad, Benjamin Tan, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, and Ramesh Karri
Arvix, December 2021
Can OpenAI Codex and Other Large Language Models Help Us Fix Security Bugs?
Hammond Pearce, Baleegh Ahmad, Benjamin Tan, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, and Ramesh Karri
Arvix, December 2021
NNoculation: Catching BadNets in the Wild
Akshaj Kumar Veldanda, Kang Liu, Benjamin Tan,, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami, Ramesh Karri, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, and Siddharth Garg
14th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security, November 2021
Understanding engagement with US (mis) information news sources on Facebook
Laura Edelson, Minh-Kha Nguyen, Ian Goldstein, Oana Goga, Damon McCoy, and Tobias Lauinger,
21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference, November 2021
A large-scale characterization of online incitements to harassment across platforms
Max Aliapoulos, Kejsi Take, Prashanth Ramakrishna, Daniel Borkan, Beth Goldberg, Jeffrey Sorensen, Anna Turner, Rachel Greenstadt, Tobias Lauinger, and Damon McCoy
21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference, November 2021
Periwinkle Doerfler, Andrea Forte, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn, and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, October 2021
Writing Style Change Detection on Multi-Author Documents
Rhia Singh, Janith Weerasinghe, and Rachael Greenstadt
Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, September 2021
Feature Vector Difference based Authorship Verification for Open-World Settings
Janith Weerasinghe, Rhia Singh, and Rachael Greenstadt
Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, September 2021
Supervised Authorship Segmentation of Open Source Code Projects
Edwin Dauber, Robert Erbacher, Gregory Shearer, Michael Weisman, Frederica Nelson, and Rachel Greenstadt
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, June 2021
Joshua Bundt, Andrew Fasano, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, William Robertson, and Tim Leek
16th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, June 2021
Building a Testbed as a Global Kubernetes Cluster
Berat Can Senel, Maxime Mouchet, Justin Cappos, Olivier Fourmaux, Timur Friedman, Rick McGeer,
IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, May 2021
SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse
Kurt Thomas, Devdatta Akhawe, Michael Bailey, Dan Boneh, Elie Bursztein, Sunny Consolvo, Nicola Dell, Zakir Durumeric, Patrick Gage Kelley, Deepak Kumar, Damon McCoy, Sarah Meiklejohn, Thomas Ristenpart, and Gianluca Stringhini
42nd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2021
ASSURE: RTL Locking Against an Untrusted Foundry
Christian Pilato, Animesh Basak Chowdhury, Donatella Sciuto, Siddharth Garg, and Ramesh Karri
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, May 2021
EdgeNet: A Multi-Tenant and Multi-Provider Edge Cloud
Berat Can Senel, Maxime Mouchet, Justin Cappos, Olivier Fourmaux, Timur Friedman, and Rick McGeer
4th International Workshop of Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking, April 2021
Best Paper Award
PyPANDA: Taming the PANDAmonium of Whole System Dynamic Analysis
Luke Craig, Andrew Fasano, Tiemoko Ballo, Tim Leek, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, and William Robertson
Proceedings of the Workshop on Binary Analysis Research (BAR), co-located with NDSS,
A Concentration of Measure Approach to Correlated Graph Matching
Farhad Shirani, Siddharth Garg, and Elza Erkip
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory, February 2021
Subverting Privacy-Preserving GANs: Hiding Secrets in Sanitized Images
Kang Liu, Benjamin Tan, and Siddharth Garg
Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21), February 2021
Game Theory for Cyber Detection: From Theory to Application
Jeffrey Pawlick and Quanyan Zhu
Springer Nature, February 2021
Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: Before the vaccine
Alberto Bracci, Matthieu Nadini, Maxwell Aliapoulios, Damon McCoy, Ian Gray, Alexander Teytelboyms, Angela Gallo, and Andrea Baronchelli
EBJ Data Science, January 2021
2020
Rosanna Bellini, Emily Tseng, Nora McDonald, Rachel Greenstadt, Damon McCoy, Thomas Ristenpart and Nicola Dell
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interactions, December 2020
Bharadwaj Mantha, Borja García de Soto and Ramesh Karri
Sustainable Cities and Society, December 2020
Thwarting Bio-IP Theft Through Dummy-Valve-Based Obfuscation
Mohammed Shayan, Sukanta Bhattacharjee, Ajymuratv Orozaliev, Yong-Ak Song, Krishnendu Chakrabarty, and Ramesh Karri
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, December 2020
Daniel Gopstein, Anne-Laure Fayard, Sven Apel, and Justin Cappos
2020 ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2020), November 2020
A Survey of Cybersecurity of Digital Manufacturing
Priyanka Mahesh, Akash Tiwari , Chenglu Jin, Panganamala R. Kumar , A.L. Narasimha Reddy, Satish T. S. Bukkapatanam, Nikhil Gupta, and Ramesh Karri
Proceedings of the IEEE, October 2020
Reverse Engineering of Additive Manufactured Composite Part by Toolpath Reconstruction using Imaging and Machine Learning
Kaushik Yanamandra, Guan Lin Chen, Xianbo Xu, Gary Mac, and Nikhil Gupta
Composites Science and Technology, September 2020
Using a Dual-Layer Specification to Offer Selective Interoperability for Uptane
Marina Moore, Ira McDonald, Andre Weimerskirch, Sebastien Awwad, Lois Anne DeLong, and Justin Cappos
escar USA Special Issue of the SAE International Journal of Transportation Cybersecurity and Privacy, Summer 2020
IoT Inspector: Crowdsourcing Labeled Network Traffic from Smart Home Devices at Scale
Danny Yuxing Huang, Noah Apthorpe, Gunes Acar, Frank Li, and Nick Feamster
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT / Ubicomp), June 2020.
Molecular Barcoding as a Defense against Benchtop Biochemical Attacks on DNA Fingerprinting and Information Forensics
Mohamed Ibrahim, Tung-Che Liang, Kristin Scott, Krishnendu Chakrabarty, and Ramesh Karri.
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, May 14, 2020.
E. Blair Cox, Quanyan Zhu, and Emily Balcetis
Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, May 2020
Dragonblood: Analyzing the Dragonfly Handshake of WPA3 and EAP-pwd
Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen
41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2020
Are Anonymity-Seekers Just Like Everybody Else? An Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Torr
Chau Tran, Kaylea Champion, Andrea Forte, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Rachel Greenstadt
41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2020
Automatic Uncovering of Hidden Behaviors From Input Validation in Mobile Apps
Qingchuan Zhao, Chaoshun Zuo, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Giancarlo Pellegrino, and Zhiqiang Lin
41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2020
A Security Analysis of the Facebook Ad Library
Laura Edelson, Tobias Lauinger, Damon McCoy
41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2020
The Many Kinds of Creepware Used for Interpersonal Attacks
Kevin A. Roundy, Paula Barmaimon Mendelberg, Nicola Dell, Damon McCoy, Daniel Nissani, Thomas Ristenpart, and Acar Tamersoy
41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2020
Effects of Credibility Indicators on Social Media News Sharing Intent
Waheeb Yaqub, Otari Kakhidze, Morgan L. Brockman, Nasir Memon, and Sameer Patil
2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2020
The Pod People: Understanding Manipulation of Social Media Popularity via Reciprocity Abuse
Janith Weerasinghe, Bailey Flanigan, Aviel Stein, Damon McCoy, and Rachel Greenstadt
Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), April 2020
Dark Matter: Uncovering the DarkComet RAT Ecosystem
Brown Farinholt, Mohammad Rezaeirad, Damon McCoy, and Kirill Levchenko
Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), April 2020
Additive Manufacturing Cyber-Physical System: Supply Chain Cybersecurity and Risks
Nikhil Gupta, Akash Tiwari, Satish T.S. Bukkapatnam, and Ramesh Karri
IEEE Access, March 2020
Public Plug-in Electric Vehicles + Grid Data: Is a New Cyberattack Vector Viable?
Samrat Acharya, Yury Dvorkin, and Ramesh Karri
IEEE Transaction on Smart Grid, February 2020
Yunfei Zhao, Linan Huang, Carol Smidts, and Quanyan Zhu
Reliability Engineering & System Safety, February 2020
MicroCash: Practical Concurrent Processing of Micropayments
Ghada Almashaqbeh, Allison Bishop, and Justin Cappos
24th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2020), February 2020.
Linan Huang and Quanyan Zhu
Computers & Security, January 2020
2019
Simulation for Cyber Risk Management–Where are we, and Where do we want to go?
Sachin Shetty, Indrajit Ray, Nurcin Ceilk, Michael Mesham, Nathaniel Bastian, and Quanyan Zhu
2019 IEEE Winter Simulation Conference, December 2019
Rui Zhang and Quanyan Zhu
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, November 2019
Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices
Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam, Gunes Acar, Arunesh Mathur, Ben Burgess, Danny Yuxing Huang, Prateek Mittal, Nick Feamster, Arvind Narayanan, and Edward Felten
2019 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2019), November 2019
Charting a Course Through Uncertain Environments: SEA Uses Past Problems to Avoid Future Failures
Preston Moore, Justin Cappos, Phyllis Frankl, and Thomas Wies
30th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2019), October 2019.
Best Paper Award
Arman Noroozian, Jan Koenders, Eelco van Veldhuizen, Carlos H. Ganan, Sumayah Alrwais, Damon McCoy, and Michel van Eeten
Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2019
Clinical Computer Security for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence
Sam Havron, Diana Freed, Rahul Chatterjee, Damon McCoy, Nicola Dell, and Thomas Ristenpart
Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2019
Reading the Tea Leaves: A Comparative Analysis of Threat Intelligence
Vector Guo Li, Matthew Dunn, Paul Pearce, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Kirill Levchenko
Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2019
in-toto: providing farm-to-table security properties for bits and bytes
Santiago Torres-Arias, Hammad Afzali, Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy, Reza Curtmola, and Justin Cappos.
Proceedings of the 28th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2019
Keeping the Smart Home Private with Smart(er) IoT Traffic Shaping
Noah Apthorpe, Danny Yuxing Huang, Dillon Reisman, Arvind Narayanan, and Nick Feamster
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2019), July 2019
The SAT Attack on IC Camouflaging: Impact and Potential Countermeasure
Mohammed El-Massad, Siddharth Garg, and Mahesh Tripunitara
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Electronic Systems–Special Issue on Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Systems Security, July 2019
Evaluating Login Challenges as a Defense Against Account Takeover
Periwinkle Doerfler, Maija Marincenko, Juri Ranieri, Yu Jiang, Angelika Moscicki, Damon McCoy, and Kurt Thomas
Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), May 2019
Interdependent Strategic Security Risk Management with Bounded Rationality in the internet of Things
Juntao Chen and Quanyan Zhu
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, April 2019
2018
Peeling the Onion’s User Experience Layer: Examining Naturalistic Use of the Tor Browser
Kevin Gallagher, Sameer Patil, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Damon McCoy, and Nasir Memon
25th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), October 2018
Schrodinger’s RAT: Profiling the Stakeholders in the Remote Access Trojan Ecosystem
Mohammad Rezaeirad, Brown Farinholt, Hitesh Dharmdasani, Paul Pearce, Kirill Levchenko, and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2018
API Blindspots: Why Experienced Developers Write Vulnerable Code
Daniela Oliveira, Tian Lin, Muhammad Rahman, Rad Akefirad, Donovan Ellis, Eliany Perez, Rahul Bobhate, Lois Anne DeLong, Justin Cappos, Yuriy Brun, and Natalie Ebner.
14th USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, August 2018
Tracking Ransomware End-to-End
Danny Yuxing Huang, Maxwell Matthaios Aliapoulios, Vector Guo Li, Luca Invernizzi, Kylie McRoberts, Elie Bursztein, Jonathan Levin, Kirill Levchenko, Alex C. Snoeren, and Damon McCoy
39th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2018
Tracking Ransomware End-to-End
Danny Yuxing Huang, Maxwell Matthaios Aliapoulios, Vector Guo Li, Luca Invernizzi, Kylie McRoberts, Elie Bursztein, Jonathan Levin, Kirill Levchenko, Alex C. Snoeren, and Damon McCoy
39th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2018
The Spyware Used in Intimate Partner Violence
Rahul Chatterjee, Periwinkle Doerfler, Hadas Orgad, Sam Havron, Jackeline Palmer, Diana Freed, Karen Levy, Nicola Dell, Damon McCoy, and Thomas Ristenpart
39th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2018
Prevalence of Confusing Code in Software Projects – Atoms of Confusion in the Wild
Dan Gopstein, Hongwei Henry Zhou, Phyllis Frankl, and Justin Cappos
15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, May 2018
Le-git-imate: Towards Verifiable Web-based Git Repositories
Hammad Afzali, Santiago Torres-Arias, Reza Curtmola, and Justin Cappos
ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, June 2018
2017
Rae Zimmerman
White Paper from the Center for Cybersecurity, December 2017
Fifteen Minutes of Unwanted Fame: Detecting and Characterizing Doxing
Peter Snyder, Periwinkle Doerfler, Chris Kanich, and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), November 2017
Identifying Products in Online Cybercrime Marketplaces: A Dataset for Fine-grained Domain Adaptation
Greg Durrett, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Rebecca S. Portnoff, Sadia Afroz, Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko and Vern Paxson
Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), September 2017
Understanding Misunderstandings in Source Code
Dan Gopstein, Jake Iannacone, Yu Yan, Lois Anne DeLong, Yanyan Zhuang, Martin K-C. Yeh, and Justin Cappos
2017 ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, September 2017
Linking Amplification DDoS Attacks to Booter Services
Johannes Krupp, Mohammad Karami, Christian Rossow, Damon McCoy and Michael Backes
International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID), September 2017
Backpage and Bitcoin: Uncovering Human Traffickers
Rebecca S. Portnoff, Danny Yuxing Huang, Periwinkle Doerfler, Sadia Afroz and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference, August 2017
CHAINIAC: Software-Update Transparency via Collectively Signed Skipchains and Verified Build PDF
Kirill Nikitin, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Linus Gasser, Ismail Khoffi, Justin Cappos, and Bryan Ford.
26th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2017
Mercury: Bandwidth-Effective Prevention of Rollback Attacks Against Community Repositories
Trishank Kuppusamy, Vladimir Diaz, and Justin Cappos
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, July 2017
Lock-in-Pop: Securing Privileged Operating System Kernels by Keeping on the Beaten Path PDF
Yiwen Li, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Sam Weber, and Justin Cappos
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, July 2017
Sumayah Alrwais, Xiaojing Liao, Xianghang Mi, Peng Wang, XiaoFeng Wang, Feng Qian, Raheem Beyah, and Damon McCoy
38th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2017
To Catch a Ratter: Monitoring the Behavior of Amateur DarkComet RAT Operators in the Wild
Brown Farinholt, Mohammad Rezaeirad, Paul Pearce, Hitesh Dharmdasani, Haikuo Yin, Stevens Le Blond, Damon McCoy, and Kirill Levchenko
38th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), May 2017
Tools for Automated Analysis of Cybercriminal Markets
Rebecca S Portnoff, Sadia Afroz, Greg Durrett, Jonathan K Kummerfeld, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko and Vern Paxson
Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, April 2017.
2016
Securing Software Updates for Automobiles
Trishank Kuppusamy, Akan Brown, Sebastien Awwad, Damon McCoy, Russ Bielawski, Cameron Mott, Sam Lauzon, Andre Weimerskirch, and Justin Cappos
14th Embedded Security in Cars Europe (escar EU), November 2016.
Investigating Commercial Pay-Per-Install and the Distribution of Unwanted Software
Kurt Thomas, Juan A. Elices Crespo, Ryan Rasti, Jean-Michel Picod, Cait Phillips, Marc-Andre Decoste, Chris Sharp, Fabio Tirelo, Ali Tofigh, Marc-Antoine Courteau, Lucas Ballard, Robert Shield, Nav Jagpal, Moheeb Abu Rajab, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Niels Provos, Elie Bursztein, and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2016
You’ve Got Vulnerability: Exploring Effective Vulnerability Notifications
Frank Li, Zakir Durumeric, Jakub Czyz, Mohammad Karami, Michael Bailey, Damon McCoy, Stefan Savage, and Vern Paxson
Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2016.
Santiago Torres-Arias, Anil Ammula, Reza Curtmola, and Justin Cappos.
Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2016
Deterring Financially Motivated Cybercrime
Zachary K. Goldman and Damon McCoy
Journal of National Security Law and Policy, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2016.
Stress Testing the Booters: Understanding and Undermining the Business of DDoS Services
Mohammad Karami, Youngsam Park and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW), April 2016.
Characterizing Long-tail SEO Spam on Cloud Web Hosting Services
Xiaojing Liao, Chang Liu, Damon McCoy, Elaine Shi and Raheem Beyah
Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW), April 2016.
Diplomat: Using Delegations to Protect Community Repositories
Trishank Kuppusamy, Santiago Torres-Arias, Vladimir Diaz, and Justin Cappos
13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI ’16), March 2016
Understanding Craigslist Rental Scams
Youngsam Park, Damon McCoy and Elaine Shi
Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference, February 2016.
Do You See What I See: Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users
Sheharbano Khattak, David Fifield, Sadia Afroz, Mobin Javed, Srikanth Sundaresan, Vern Paxson, Steven J. Murdoch, and Damon McCoy
Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, February 2016
Foundational Research Papers
These older papers represent the groundwork for a number of research initiative now being conducted by CCS faculty
Frank Imeson, Ariq Emtenan, Siddharth Garg, and Mahesh V. Tripunitara
22nd USENIX Security Symposium, August 2013
Best Student Paper Award
Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems
Justin Samuel, Nick Mathewson, Justin Cappos, and Roger Dingledine.
17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, October 2010.
Finalist for 2010 AT&T Award for Best Applied Security Research Paper
A Look In the Mirror: Attacks on Package Managers
Justin Cappos, Justin Samuel, Scott Baker, and John H. Hartman
15th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, October 2008.
Stork: Package Management for Distributed VM Environments
Justin Cappos, Scott Baker, Jeremy Plichta, Duy Nyugen, Jason Hardies, Matt Borgard, Jeffry Johnston, and John H. Hartman.
21st Large Installation System Administration Conference, November 2007.