Labs and Groups

NYU CCS faculty members lead a number of labs and groups that have produced solutions to real-world cybersecurity issues. These labs include:

BAAHL, an acronym for the Brooklyn Application, Architecture, and Hardware Lab,  specializes in computer hardware design, with a primary goal of making privacy-preserving computation practical. Led by Prof. Brandon Reagen, BAAHL focuses on optimizing machine learning systems for private computation. With a strong emphasis on energy-efficiency and security, the lab aims to accelerate secure computation and enable privacy-preserving machine learning.

The cleverly named EnSuRe lab, which stands for Energy-aware, Secure and Reliable Computing Research Group, is lead by Dr. Siddharth Garg, Institute Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The group describes its research as “at the intersections of computer hardware design, cyber-security, and machine learning, with a particular focus on computer hardware,” including electronic design automation and micro-architectural solutions.

The Laboratory for Agile and Resilient Complex Systems (LARX): Lead by Quanyan Zhu, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the research activities of the LARX lab focus on developing fundamental principles and tools for secure, resilient, and sustainable dynamical systems and networks. These tools have applications to communication networks, cyber-physical systems, modern critical infrastructures. smart energy systems, and human-in-the-loop systems. 

Interdisciplinary by design, the LARX team collaborates with faculty members and graduate students in the Power Lab, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, Laboratory for Entrepreneurship in Data Sciences at NYU, and with other research institutes. Its work is currently funded by government agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), and NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT).

The Machine Learning, Embedded Systems, and Software/Systems Security or MESS Lab is one of the newest research lab affiliated with the Center for Cybersecurity. Under the direction of Dr. Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, the lab works on such issues as software security, vulnerability injection, and the security challenges of embedded devices. The lab also collaborates with the Secure Systems Lab on a virtual machine design that limits interactions with an operating system kernel to only commonly-used code, and with the EnSuRe lab to investigate backdoors in deep neural networks.

The mLab, under the direction of Dr. Danny Yuxing Huang, is dedicated to identifying and thwarting real-world security and privacy threats, particularly those related to the use of smart devices on the Internet of Things.  The “m” in its title reflects the team’s commitment to using empirical measurements to allow non-technical consumers to assess potential security issues with their smart home IoT devices. The lab also develops new methods to thwart cybercrime, such trace millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency transactions of criminals, such as ransomware.

The Secure Systems Laboratory, under the direction of Justin Cappos, a professor of computer science and engineering, works to find practical and deployable solutions to real-world security threats. Over the past few years, the lab has developed products and improved on existing system designs that detect and isolate security faults,  and provide secure mechanisms for fixing software flaws in different contexts.  More recently, the lab has developed and deployed a framework for securing software supply chains, and investigated the development of a decentralized secure content delivery network.

We focus on deploying our solutions in practice to maximize the impact of our work. Our technology is used in a variety of popular products including Docker, git, and the package managers for most Linux distributions.