Students

Research Students of David Evans

Alumni: PhD · Masters · Undergraduate Researchers · Visitors — Current Students

Security Research Group Lunch (12 December 2017)
Haina Li, Felix Park, Mainuddin Jonas, Anant Kharkar, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Suya,
David Evans, Yuan Tian, Riley Spahn, Weilin Xu, Guy "Jack" Verrier

Current Research Students

Anshuman Suri, PhD student (since Fall 2019) — robust learning

Bargav Jayaraman, PhD student (since Fall 2016) — privacy-preserving machine learning

Fnu Suya, PhD Student (since Fall 2017) (co-advised with Yuan Tian) — adversarial machine learning

Xiao Zhang, PhD Student (since Summer 2018) — adversarial machine learning

Yu-Han (Hannah) Chen, PhD student (since Fall 2019) — natural language processing

Sicheng Zhu, visiting graduate researcher (Master's degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences) (since summer 2019) — adversarial robustness

Youssef Errami, undergraduate researcher (since summer 2019) — evaluating privacy for machine learning

Jonah Weissman, undergraduate researcher (since summer 2019) — evaluating privacy for machine learning

Security Research Group Lunch (5 May 2017)
Bill Young, Hannah Li, Weilin Xu, Mohammad Etemad, Bargav Jayaraman, David Evans, Helen Simecek, Anant Kharkar, Darion Cassel

Graduated PhD Students

Weilin Xu, Computer Science PhD Spring 2019

Co-advised with Yanjun Qi

Thesis: Improving Robustness of Machine Learning Models using Domain Knowledge

First and current employment: Intel (Adversarial Machine Learning Research, Hillsboro, OR)

Samee Zahur, Computer Science PhD Spring 2016

Thesis: Demystifying secure computation: familiar abstractions for efficient protocols

First and current employment: Google (Mountain View)

Yuchen Zhou, Computer Engineering PhD Spring 2015

Thesis: Improving Security and Privacy of Integrated Web Applications

Winner of ECE Rader Graduate Research Award, 2014

First and current employment: Palo Alto Networks

Yan Huang, Computer Science PhD Fall 2012

Thesis: Practical Secure Two-Party Computation, August 2012

Current employment: Assistant Professor, Indiana University (since Fall 2014)
First post-PhD employment: Research Associate, University of Maryland

Publications

Karsten Nohl, Computer Engineering PhD Spring 2009

Thesis: Implementable Privacy for RFID Systems, January 2009

Winner of ECE Rader Graduate Research Award, 2008

Current occupation: Chief Scientist, Security Research Labs (Berlin)

Nathanael Paul — Computer Science PhD 2008

Thesis: Disk-Level Malware Detection, May 2008

Current occupation: Associate Professor, University of Tennessee, Security Research Scientist and Director of Center for Trustworthy Embedded Systems, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

First employment: Postdoc, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Andrew Tanenbaum)

Jinlin Yang [LinkedIn] — Computer Science PhD 2007

Thesis: Automatic Inference and Effective Application of Temporal Specifications, May 2007

Current occupation: Snapchat
First Employment: Microsoft Center for Software Excellence (Redmond, WA)

Security Research Group (19 January 2016)
Jack Doerner, Samee Zahur, Mahnush Movahedi, Mohammad Etemad, Hannah Li, Weilin Xu, Karen Pan

Research Group Lunch (6 May 2015)

Prospective Students

I am always happy to exchange email with UVa students looking for research projects. My primary research area is computer security which includes software security, applications of cryptography, system security and network security. I will also supervise outstanding students interested in other areas.

If you are a current UVa undergraduate student, visit our research group blog to learn about what is going on in our group, and send me an email to arrange a meeting. All students are also welcome (and encouraged) to attend our Security Research meetings (sign up for the mailing list). I generally prefer to find first or second year students so you have sufficient time to do something interesting before you graduate, but I have also been known to accept exceptional third or fourth year students.

If you are a current UVa graduate student looking for a research advisor, look at my research websites and some of our papers. If the kind of work we do seems interesting to you, contact me to arrange a meeting, preferably to discuss some of your own original research ideas.

If you are interested in coming to UVa to do a graduate degree, please feel free to contact me (but it would be a good idea to read my advice for prospective students first).

UVa Students and Alumni at USENIX Security 2011

Graduated Masters Students

Mainuddin Jonas — UVa MCS 2019 (December), now at Google

Ethan Lowman — UVa MS 2019, now at Datadog

Hannah Li — UVa BACS 2015, MCS 2017, now at Facebook

Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids (Code)

Longze Chen — UVa MCS 2015, now at Center for Open Science
Simon Sibomana — UVa MCS 2015
Ivan Alagenchev — UVa MCS 2014

ArktikFox: The Case for Contextual Security Policies

First employment: Amazon

Tianhao Tong — UVa MCS 2013

GuarDroid: A Trusted Path for Password Entry, Mobile Security Technologies. IEEE. San Francisco, California. May 2013. (Paper: PDF, 15 pages)

First employment: Twitter

Jeffrey Shirley — UVa MCS 2011

The User is Not the Enemy: Fighting Malware by Tracking User Intentions, New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW 2008), Lake Tahoe, California, 22-25 September 2008. (Paper: PDF, 13 pages)

Benjamin Cox — UVA MCS 2006

Security through Redundant Data Diversity , 38^th IEEE/IFPF International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Anchorage, Alaska, June 2008. [PDF]

N-Variant Systems: A Secretless Framework for Security through Diversity , 15^th USENIX Security Symposium, Vancouver, BC, August 2006. Talk slides: [PPT, PDF]

Software: N-Variant Systems Framework
First employment: Northrop Grumman (Charlottesville, VA)

Ana Nora Sovarel — UVA MCS 2006

Automatic Identification and Protection of Security-Critical Data

Where's the FEEB?: The Effectiveness of Instruction Set Randomization, USENIX Security 2005, August 2005. [PDF] [HTML]

First employment: UVa Hospital (Medical Informatics)

Lingxuan Hu — 2004

Localization for Mobile Sensor Networks, Tenth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom 2004). [PDF] Talk Slides [PPT]

Using Directional Antennas to Prevent Wormhole Attacks, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, February 2004. [PDF]

Secure Aggregation for Wireless Networks, Workshop on Security and Assurance in Ad hoc Networks. January, 2003. [PDF]

Software: MCL Simulator (Monte Carlo Localization)
First employment: Microsoft (Redmond, WA)

Selvin George — UVA MCS 2003

EnviroTrack: Towards an Environmental Computing Paradigm for Distributed Sensor Networks, The 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. Tokyo, Japan. March 23-26, 2004. [PDF]

A Biological Programming Model for Self-Healing, First ACM Workshop on Survivable and Self-Regenerative Systems, October 2003. [PDF]

A Biologically Inspired Programming Model for Self-Healing Systems, Workshop on Self-Healing Systems (WOSS'02), November, 2002. [PDF]

Software: CellSim
First employment: Yahoo!
Current employment: Twitter

Greg Yukl — UVA MCS 2003

In-Line Source Code Generation

David Larochelle — UVA MCS 2002

Statically Detecting Likely Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities, 2001 USENIX Security Symposium, Aug 2001. (PDF, HTML, 13 pages)

Software: Splint
First employment: Ounce Labs

Current employment: Lead Engineer for Media Cloud, Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard University)

Joel Winstead — UVA MS 2002

MS Thesis: Structured Exception Semantics for Parallel Loops, January 2002.

First employment: Cigital

Weilin Zhong — UVA MCS 2002

When Ants Attack: Security Issues for Stigmergic Systems, UVA TR 2002-23.

First employment: Cigital (Current employment: Aspect Security)

Andrew Twyman — MIT MEng '99 (co-supervised with John Guttag)

MEng Thesis: Flexible Code Safety for Win32 (winner of MIT Masterworks Prize)

Software: Naccio (Win32)
First Employment: Maker Communications (acquired by Conexant)
Current Employment: Liquid Machines

Research Group Lunch (11 May 2011)

Undergraduate Research Alumni

Completed PhDs

John Calandrino (2002) — Microsoft

University of North Carolina (PhD 2009) (worked with James Anderson on real-time scheduling for multicore platforms)

RTSS 2006: [PDF], Euromicro 2007: [PDF]

Adrienne Felt (2006-2008) — Google

UC Berkeley PhD 2012; privacy protection for social networking APIs, mashup security issues; CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Finalist 2008; SEAS Outstanding Student Award 2008

Christopher Frost (2003-2004) — Samsara

UCLA (PhD 2010); Google (2010-2015). Worked on the Featherstich File System Project with Eddie Kohler).

SOSP 2007 paper: [PDF])

William (GJ) Halfond (2002) — Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California.

Georgia Tech (PhD 2010) (worked on web application security with Alessandro Orso).

FSE 2007: [PDF], TSE 2007: [PDF], FSE 2006: [PDF], ASE 2005: [PDF], WODA 2005: [PDF]

Felipe Huici (2001) — NEC Europe, Hid

University College London (PhD 2009)
Now at NEC research in Heidelberg working on ClickOS

Jonathan McCune (2001-2003) — Google

CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Honorable Mentionee in 2003

CMU PhD 2009 (advised by Adrian Perrig and Mike Reiter)

Research Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University

EuroSys 2008: [PDF], ASPLOS 2008: [PDF], Oakland 2007: [PDF], USENIX Tech 2006: [PDF], Oakland 2005 (Seeing is Believing): [PDF], Oakland 2005 (Detection of Denial of Message Attacks): [PDF]).

William Melicher (2012-2013; BACS 2013) — Palo Alto Networks

Carnegie Mellon Univeristy PhD 2019 (advised by Lujo Bauer)

USENIX Security 2016 (Best Paper): Fast, Lean, and Accurate: Modeling Password Guessability Using Neural Networks

Matt Spear (2005-2006) — Google

UC Davis (PhD 2010, worked with Karl Levitt and Felix Wu on peer-to-peer security)

Infocom 2008: [PDF], ICC 2008: [PDF]

Currently in PhD Programs

Matthew Wallace (2018-2019) — University of Wisconsin

Darion Cassel (2016-2017) — Carnegie Mellon University

Samuel Havron (2015-2017) — Cornell University

Ethan Robertson (2016-2017) — University of Virginia

Jack Doerner (UVA BSCS 2015; Wizard of Oblivion, 2015-2016) — Northeastern University

Hao Bai (2014-2016; BSCS 2016) — Harvard University

Natnatee ("Ko") Dokmai (2013-2015; BACS 2015) — Indiana University 2015

Patrick Mutchler (2010-2011; BSCS 2011) — Stanford University (Telephone Metadata Privacy [News, Guardian])

Other Alumni and Visitors

Sam Medlin, undergraduate researcher (since summer 2019, co-advised by Denis Nekipelov) — revealing privacy preferences

Nathaiel Grevatt (2018-2019) — secure computation and the GDPR

Aditi Narvekar (2017-2019) — adversarial machine learning

Felix Park (2017-2018) — adversarial machine learning

Helen Simecek (2017-2019) — evading classifiers

Amar Singh (2017-2018) — proof-of-stake vulnerabilities

Parvesh Samayamanthula (visiting High School student, summer 2018) — adversarial NLP for privacy policies

Kelvin Sparks (since Fall 2017 - BSCS 2018) — cryptocurrency governance

Anant Kharkar (fall 2015 - BSCS 2018) — evading classifiers

Jesse Nayak (Summer 2017, BSCS 2018) — oblivious substring search

Noah Kim (undergraduate researcher, summer 2017) — feature

Mohammad Etemad (2016-2017; Post-Doc, PhD Koc University, Turkey)

Mahnush Movahedi (spring 2016; Post-Doc, PhD from University of New Mexico) — Yale University

Ori Shimony (summer 2015-2016) — incentives and Tor

Ziqi Liu (fall 2015-spring 2016, BACS 2016) — web security, now at Microsoft

Karen Pan (2015-2016) — web security, now at UVa Statistics

Theo Gutman-Solo (2013-2014; BACS 2014) — (entered Princeton University PhD program in Operations Research, 2014)

Hunter Leath (summer 2014-fall 2015, BACS Fall 2015) — airdispat.ch and Melange, now at Amazon (Cambridge, MA)

Samantha Lagestee (summer 2015) — learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond

Andrew Lee (summer 2015) — learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond

Shay Batheja (summer 2015) — learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond

Mike Verdicchio (summer 2015) — learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond

Brian Walter (summer 2015) — learning materials for PicoCTF and beyond

Corey Ames (2014-2015)

Mark Hannan (summer 2014)

Michael Mahoney (summer 2014)

Kyle McGuire (summer 2014)

Rob Michaels (summer 2014)

Robert Jacobs (summer 2013) — prime numbers

Peter Chapman (2009-2012; BACS 2012) — CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Runner-Up in 2012; entered CMU's PhD Program, completed Masters 2015, now at DuoLingo

Jonathan Burket (2010-2013; BACS 2013) — (entered CMU's PhD Program; CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Honorable Mentionee) 2013

Muhammad Naveed (Graduate student visit while PhD student at UIUC, Summer 2013) — Assistant Professor at University of Southern Californa)

Travis Dean (summer 2013) — implementing secure computation protocols

Guanmei Liang (summer 2013)

Shengxuan (Jerry) Ye (Spring 2011) — CalTech (Masters in Computation and Neural Systems); now at Facebook

Jiamin Chen (Summer 2011)

Austin DeVinney (summer 2011, visiting from Radford University) — secure web application framework

SangHyung Koo (Summer 2011) — secure mobile applications

Casey Mihaloew (Summer 2011) — secure web aplication framework

Yikan Chen (2009-2011), PhD Student (Computer Engineering) — Auditing Information Leakage for Distance Metrics (now at Amazon)

Jenny Cha (summer 2011) — secure web applications

Brittany Harris (summer 2011) — secure computation

Michael Weaver (summer/fall 2010, BSCS 2011) — a secure web application framework

Muzzammil Zaveri (summer/fall 2010, BSCS 2011) — a secure web application framework

Rachel Lathbury (summer 2008, BACS 2010) — University of Pennsylvania (linguistics)

Richard Hsu (summer 2008) — scene-based CAPTCHAs

Paul DiOrio (summer 2008) — linguistics and security

Meghan Knoll (summer 2007) — spyware

Carly Simpson (summer 2007) — security applications of GPUs

Salvatore Guarnieri (2003-2006) — University of Washington (Masters, 2010); now at Google (New York); CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award Finalist in 2006

Michael Peck (2003-2004) — Johns Hopkins University

David Friedman (2002) — Johns Hopkins University

Adam Trost (2001-2002) — UVa Law School

Ryan Persaud (2001) — UCSD

Senior Theses Supervised