Atul Prakash

Research Interests:

Teaching:

• Fall 2009: EECS 182: Building Information Environments
• Winter 2009: EECS 282: Information Systems Design and Programming (new course)
• Fall 2008: EECS 182: Building Information Environments (new course)
• Fall 2007: EECS 588: Computer and Network Security

Research in the News

• Read what others are saying about our research on online security at financial web sites

Some sampling of my research:

• Paper at the Usenix Security Symposium 2009 on the Capsule system.
  • Kevin Borders, Eric Vander Weele, Billy Lau, and Atul Prakash, Protecting Confidential Data on Personal Computers with Storage Capsules. Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, Aug. 2009. [pdf]
• Paper at HOTSEC'09 Workshop.
  • Swati Gupta, Kristen LeFevre, and Atul Prakash. SPAN: A Unified Framework and Toolkit for Querying Heterogeneous Access Policies, the 4th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HOTSEC) , August 2009. [pdf]
• Paper at Oakland'09 on how to analyze outbound web traffic and quantify the information content being leaked in it:
  • Kevin Borders and Atul Prakash, Quantifying Information Leaks in Outbound Web Traffic. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2009. [pdf]
• Paper presented at SOUPS'08 our work on pervasiveness of security-related design flaws at financial web sites.
  • Laura Falk, Atul Prakash, Kevin Borders, "Analyzing Websites for User-visible Security Design Flaws", presented at Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy, July 23-25th, 2008.
  • Our conference presentation and some demo videos
  • Link to the full paper at the symposium web site
  • Link to a blog on this issue http://bankwebsecurity.blogspot.com
  • Another blog on security issues by Kevin Borders http://www.straightsectalk.com
  • Other Links, including news, etc.
• Our work that analyzes the risks of more sophisticated spam by using non-private profile data from social networks such as Facebook.
  • Garrett Brown, Travis Howe, Michael Ihbe, Atul Prakash, and Kevin Borders. "Social Networks and Context-Aware Spam", ACM Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work, Nov. 8-12, 2008. [pdf copy]
• Work with Web Tap Security on better measurement mechanisms for information leakage.
  • Kevin Borders and Atul Prakash, Towards Quantification of Network-based Information Leaks via HTTP. 3rd Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, July 29, 2008, San Jose, CA.
• Our work on on designing scalable file systems for virtual machine clusters.
  • Xin Zhao, Atul Prakash, and Kevin Borders. Prism: Providing flexible and fast filesystem cloning service for virtual servers, Middleware 2008 , Dec. 1-5, 2008, Leuven, Belgium.
•   WhereAbouts Project : Design of location-aware pervasive systems
  • Also see TalkingPoint Project on using RFID-based orientation systems for assisting people with blindness:
•   Virtual partitioning within operating systems to enhance security. See our work on SVFS and virtual RPC to protect file systems.
•   CPOL: High-throughput privacy/security policy evaluation infrastructure. [CPOL CCS 2005 paper] [download software from http://cpol.sourceforge.net]
• Web Tap Project on detecting covert web traffic [ ACM CCS 04 paper]  
  
• DistView Collaboratory toolkit
  
• Antigone: A Framework for Security Policy Management in group multicast systems
  
• DACIA: A mobile component framework for building adaptive distributed applications
  

My Bio

Publications

• In reverse chronological order...

Current Graduate Students

• Billy Lau
• Beng Heng Ng

Previous Ph.D. Students

• Kevin Borders (Ph.D. 2009). National Security Agency and startup (Web Tap Security, Inc.)
• Xin Zhao (Ph.D. 2007). Google, Mountain View, CA
• Lukasz Opyrchal (Ph.D. 2004). Assistant Prof. at Miami University, Ohio
• Radu Litiu (Ph.D. 2001). Atlas Division, Microsoft, Seattle
• Patrick McDaniel  (PhD: 2001); Associate Prof. at Penn. State Univ.
• Amit Mathur  ( PhD: 2001) Oracle Corp., India
• Jang Ho Lee, Ph.D, 1999. Assistant Prof. Hongik Univ., Seoul, Korea
• Hyong Sop Shim, Ph.D., 1999, Member of Technical Staff, Telecordia Corporation, New Jersey, in the area of multimedia and group collaboration.
• Nelson Manohar, Ph.D. 1997, in the area of multimedia and networking.
• Trent Jaeger; Ph.D. 1997, Associate Professor, Penn State University, in the area of security and operating systems.
• Santanu Paul, Ph.D. 1995, General Manager (Operations), Virtusa, Inc.
  • Article on Santanu Paul in IT Business Weekly Jan 2005
  • BBC News Article
• Ratib Al-Zoubi, Ph.D. 1992, software consulting.
   

Contact Info.: