Security and Cryptography

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
Faculty
Mihir Bellare
Earlence Fernandes
Alex Gantman
Nadia Heninger
Deepak Kumar
Qipeng Liu
Daniele Micciancio
Imani Munyaka
Stefan Savage
Aaron Schulman
Hovav Shacham
Alex C. Snoeren
Deian Stefan
Geoffrey M. Voelker
Affiliated Faculty
kc claffy
Christian Dameff
Ranjit Jhala
Ryan Kastner
Nadia Polikarpova
Steven Swanson
Dean Tullsen
Yiying Zhang
Scientists, Postdocs and Research Staff
Cindy Moore
PhD Students
Arshia Arya
Alex Bellon
Paul Chung
Henry Feng
Miro Haller
Michelina Hanlon
Zihan Hao
Katherine Izhikevich
Shreya Kochar
Shun Kashiwa
Seoyoung Kweon
Andrey Labunets
Elisa Luo
Luoxi Meng
Nishit Pandya
Rishabh Ranjan
Sumanth Rao
Vivien Rindisbacher
Sierra Rowley
Laura Shea
Ye Shu
Adam Suhl
Alisha Ukani
Wenyi "Morty" Zhang
Lydia Zoghbi
Haodi Zou
MS Students
Alexis Morales Flores
Eugene Lau
Recent Alumni

Hosein Yavarzadeh (Ph.D. 2026) → Qualcomm
Alisha Ukani (Ph.D. 2026) → UW postdoc
Ben Du (Ph.D. 2025) → UCLA postdoc
Enze Alex Liu (Ph.D. 2025) → CMU postdoc
Keegan Ryan (Ph.D. 2025) → Trail of Bits
George Sullivan (Ph.D. 2025)
Evan Johnson (Ph.D. 2025) → NYU
Naomi Smith (Ph.D. 2025) → Flexwash
Matthew Kolosick (Ph.D. 2025) → Category Labs
Mark Schultz (Ph.D. 2024) → Fabric Cryptography

Nishant Bhaskar (Ph.D. 2023) → MQ Prime
Hannah Davis (Ph.D. 2023) → Seagate
Ariana Mirian (Ph.D. 2023) → Censys → Beesafe
Audrey Randall (Ph.D. 2023) → Google
Caleb Stanford (postdoc 2022-2023) → UC Davis
Daniel Moghimi (postdoc 2020-2022) → Google
Shravan Narayan (Ph.D. 2022) → UT Austin
Sam Crow (Ph.D. 2022) → Meta
Bingyu Shen (Ph.D. 2022) → Meta
John Renner (Ph.D. 2022) → Cubist
Gautam Akiwate (Ph.D. 2022) → Stanford postdoc → Apple
Jessica Sorrell (Ph.D. 2022) → UPenn (postdoc) → JHU
Craig Disselkoen (Ph.D. 2022) → Amazon

Leo Cao (M.S. 2024) → University of Wisconsin Ph.D. program

Annie Dai (B.S. 2023) → University of Maryland Ph.D. program
Kaiwen He (B.S. 2023) → MIT Ph.D. program
Isabel Suizo (B.S. 2022) → Google → CMU Ph.D. program

Doreen Riepel (postdoc 2023-2024) → CISPA
Grant Ho (postdoc 2021-2023) → University of Chicago
Gabrielle De Micheli (postdoc 2021-2023) <\span> → LG
Alex Marder (postdoc 2019-2020, Res. Scientist 2020-2023) → Johns Hopkins University

[All Alumni]
Recent News

Hosein Yavarzadeh November 13— Congratulations to Hosein Yavarzadeh on successfully defending the dissertation "Understanding and Exploiting Microarchitectural Leakage Across Isolation Boundaries: From Branch Predictors to Confidential Computing"! Hosein was co-advised by Dean Tullsen and Deian Stefan, and is headed to Qualcomm's CPU Security team as a Senior Security Engineer.

November 13— Mohabi: Disaggregating and Sandboxing the Firefox JavaScript Engine was a finalist in the CSAW 2026 Applied Research Competition. Congrats again to Abhishek Sharma, Tal Garfinkel, Deian Stefan, Hovav Shacham, Shravan Narayan and co-authors!

July 13— Congrats to Abhishek Sharma (a UCSD alum, now a Ph.D. student at UT Austin), Tal Garfinkel (a former UCSD research scientist), Deian Stefan, Hovav Shacham, Shravan Narayan and co-authors, whose paper Mohabi: Disaggregating and Sandboxing the Firefox JavaScript Engine received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at OSDI 2026.

June 5— We have two winners at the CSE Department Doctoral Awards! Evan Johnson (now an assisstant professor at NYU) received the dissertation award ("Verifiably Secure Software Sandboxing") and Sumanth Rao received the Service and Leadership award (with a RECORD 15 nominations!). Congratgs to both Sumanth and Evan!

June 5— Congratulations to Alisha Ukani who successfully defended her thesis, "Empirically Analyzing Web Privacy Defenses" today! Alisha will be soon head to UCSD North (UW) where she will commence post-doctoral studies. Good luck, Alisha!

Second from left, Enzie Liu, Sumanth Rao, Ye Shu, Geoff Voelker, recieving Distinguished Paper award May 18— Congratulations to Sumanth Rao, Ye Shu, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Geoff Voelker and Enze Liu for reciving the IEEE Distuguished Paper award for their paper Lost in Translation: Text Message Spoofing via Email!

April 14— Congratulations to Lydia Zoghbi, David Thien, Ranjit Jhala, Deian Stefan and Caleb Stanford (a former UCSD postdoc with Ranjit and Deian, now at UC Davis), whose paper Auditing Rust Crates Effectively won a Distinguished Paper Award at ESOP 2026! Lydia Zoghbi

Sierra Rowley April 13— Congratulations to Sierra Rowley, who was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Sierra is a Ph.D. student working with Deian Stefan.

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. International Association for Cryptologic Research

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!
[All News]
Recent Publications

Something to Talk About: Social Media as a Lens on Healthcare Ransomware Events, Seoyoung Kweon, Paul Chung, Isabel Straw, Christian J. Dameff, Jeffrey L. Tully, Stefan Savage, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Deepak Kumar, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2027.

Large-Scale Measurement and Real-World Mitigation of Web Browser Fingerprinting in the Wild, Tom Ritter, Fatih Kilic, Frederik Braun, Elisa Luo, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Christoph Kerschbaumer, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), The Hague, The Netherlands, November 2026.

The Case of the Missing Cases: Analyzing Sealed U.S. Federal Cases, Ye Shu, Elisa Luo, Paul Chung, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Karlsruhe, Germany, October 2026.

BLE Theft Auto: Evaluating the Security of Aftermarket BLE-based Automotive Remote Control Systems, Jerry Yu, Yibo Wei, Sumanth Rao, Mohak Vaswani, Jefferson Chien, Christian Dameff, Nishant Bhaskar, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, Baltimore, MD, August 2026.

Design and Implementation of a Physical Implant Attack on the Boeing 737, Sam Crow, Stephen Checkoway, Patrick Merceier, Pat Pannuto, Stefan Savage, and Aaron Schulman, Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, Baltimore, MD, August 2026.

WarrInt: Integrity Validation for Criminal Legal Process, Alisha Ukani, Ross Greer, Katherine Izhikevich, Earlence Fernandes, Alex C. Snoeren, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, Baltimore, MD, August 2026.

Mohabi: Disaggregating and Sandboxing the Firefox JavaScript Engine, Abhishek Sharma, Anand Balaji, Zachary Yedidia, Anthony Du, Taehyun Noh, Iain Ireland, Jan de Mooij, Matthew Gaudet, Tal Garfinkel, Deian Stefan, Hovav Shacham, and Shravan Narayan, Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), Seattle, WA, July 2026. (Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award and CSAW 2026 Applied Research Competition Finalist).

Countering Fabricated Legal Documents: Aligning Verification Attention to Salient Objects through Zero-Shot Detection of Confounding or Obscuring Symbols, Vrishan Inukollu, Porfirio Montoya, Ross Greer, Alisha Ukani, Katherine Izhikevich, Earlence Fernandes, Stefan Savage, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the From Perception to Persuasion: Challenges and Advances in Misinformation Detection in Society (PP-MisDet) Workshop at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), Denver, CO, June 2026.

Lost in Translation: Text Message Spoofing via Email, Sumanth Rao, Ye Shu, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Enze Liu, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2026. (Distinguished Paper Award).

Understanding Server-side Commercial Fingerprinting, Elisa Luo, Tom Ritter, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Dubai, UAE, May 2026.

Auditing Rust Crates Effectively, Lydia Zoghbi, David Thien, Ranjit Jhala, Deian Stefan, and Caleb Stanford, Proceedings of the European Symposium on Programming (ESOP), Turin, Italy, April 2026. (Distinguished Paper Award).

Work-in-progress: Assertive Trace, Shun Kashiwa, Michael Coblenz, and Deian Stefan, Proceedings of the Workshop on Measurements, Attacks, and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb), San Diego, CA, February 2026.

[All Publications]
Affiliations
Center for Networked Systems (CNS)         Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)       San Diego Super Computer Center (SDSC)        California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-IT2) CalIT(2)
Sponsors