About me

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I lead the SECuRE and Trustworthy Computing Lab (SECRETLab).

In the past, I was an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow and Assistant Research Scientist at the Dept. of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University. My research was supported by the 2009 NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship. At Hopkins, I was a member of the Hopkins Storage Systems Lab and collaborated with Prof. Randal Burns.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science in October 2009, from University of  Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My advisor was Prof. Marianne Winslett. I was also co-advised by Prof. Radu Sion of SUNY-StonyBrook.

I am primarily interested in Cloud Computing, Computer Security, Secure Provenance, Trustworthy Databases and File Systems. I also introduced the notion of digital data waste - an area where my research has been covered by MIT Technology Review, cNET, and other media outlets.

I am the developer of SPROV - a library for secure provenance, and TLOW - an architecture for secure, regulatory compliant database systems. My PhD dissertation topic introduced the first implementation and analysis of secure provenance schemes in the context of file systems, and the fastest implementation of a regulatory-compliant database (100x faster audits than the previous best work).

In Fall 2011, I am teaching the graduate level course CS 491/691/791 "Security and Privacy in Cloud Computing" at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. This is one of the first courses on the topic and I have previously taught this course at Johns Hopkins in Spring 2011 and Spring 2010.

Funding

Dissertation Research

News

Title: Trustoworthy History and Provenance for Files and Databases

[PDF] [Defense slides]

• April 2012: I received a $587,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security for my proposal on secure location provenance.
  
  
• January 2012: Dr. Thamar Solorio and I received a $393,000 grant from the office of Naval Research for our proposal on Secure Document Signatures
  
  
• December 2011: I received a Google Faculty Research Award based on my proposal on Location Provenance.
  
  
• November 2011: I will serve as the Student Travel Grant co-chair for ACM CCS 2012.
  
  
• June 2011: I received two grants from Amazon: AWS Research Grant, and AWS Teaching Grant.
  
  
• February 2011: I have been invited as a panelist in the Cloud Security panel of the NSF Cloud PI Meeting, 2011.
  
  
• December 2010: Our paper "Efficient Audit-based Compliance for Relational Data Retention" was accepted at ASIACCS 2011.
  
  
• December 2010: I am serving as a member of the program committees of SECRYPT 2011 and UPGRADE-CN 2011, a CCGrid 2011 workshop.
  
  
• October 2010: I am serving as a member of the editorial advisory board of the upcoming book Internet and Distributed Computing Advancements: Theoretical Frameworks and Practical Applications, IGI Global.
  
  
• October 2010: I will serve in the Program Committee of DBSec 2011 and EIDWT 2011.
  
  
  [older news]