R. Sekar

Rank/Position Title:

Professor

Home Page:

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~sekar

Date of original appointment to this faculty, followed by dates and ranks of advancement:

• 1999 Assistant Professor
• 2001 Associate Professor

Degrees:

Conferences, workshops, and professional development:

Education:

• Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education, Atlanta , GA , 2005.
• Workshop on Information Assurance Education (Organized), Stony Brook , NY , 2004.
• Microsoft faculty summit, Redmond , Washington , 2003.
• Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education, Washington , D.C. , 2003. .
• Committee on National Security Systems, Washington , D.C. , 2002.

Research:

I attend 4 to 8 professional conferences and workshops related to CS research every year. Listed below are the conferences attended in the past 6 months.

• USENIX Technical Symposium, April 2005.
• NSF/Treasury Workshop on Security for the Finance Industry, March 2005.
• ISOC Network and Distributed Systems Symposium, February 2005.
• ACM Foundations of Software Engineering, November 2004.
• ACSA New Security Paradigms Workshop, September 2004.

Other related computing experience:

• 1991-96: Research Scientist, Computer Networking Research, Bellcore, Morristown, NJ. Duties include conduct of research, as well as large-scale software development in teams involving several tens of researchers and developers.
• 1996-99: Assistant professor, Iowa state university, Ames, IA.

Department, college, and/or university committee membership:

Department-level committees:

• Chairman, graduate admissions committee, 2001-2005
• Member, graduate committee, 2003-2005
• Member, Faculty recruiting committee, 2002-2005

University-level committees:

• Faculty Senate Computing and Communications committee, 2003-2005

Principal publications of the last five years.

Handbooks:

• "Term Indexing," R. Sekar, I.V. Ramakrishnan and A. Voronkov, Handbook of Automated Reasoning, Edited by A. Robinson and A. Voronkov, Elsevier Science/MIT Press, 2001.

Refereed Conferences:

• "V-NetLab: A Cost-Effective Platform to Support Course Projects in Computer Security," K. Krishna, W. Sun and R. Sekar, 9th Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education, 2005.
• "Efficient Techniques for Comprehensive Protection from Memory Error Exploits," S. Bhatkar , R. Sekar and D. DuVarney, USENIX Security Symposium, 2005.
• "One-way isolation: An Effective Approach for Realizing Safe Execution Environments," W. Sun, Z. Liang, R. Sekar and V.N. Venkatakrishnan, ISOC Network and Distributed Systems Symposium (NDSS), 2005.
• "An Efficient and Backwards-Compatible Transformation to Ensure Memory Safety of C Programs," Wei Xu, Daniel C. Duvarney, and R. Sekar, ACM SIGSOFT Int’l Symp. on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2004.
• "Isolated Program Execution: An Application Transparent Approach for Executing Untrusted Programs," Z. Liang, V.N. Venkatakrishnan and R. Sekar, Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2003. (Best paper award.)
• "Model-Carrying Code: A Practical Approach for Safe Execution of Untrusted Applications," R. Sekar, V.N. Venkatakrishnan, et al, ACM Symp. on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2003.
• Address Obfuscation: An Efficient Approach to Combat a Broad Range of Memory Error Exploits," Sandeep Bhatkar, Daniel C. DuVarney, and R. Sekar, USENIX Security Symposium, 2003.
• "Specification-Based Anomaly Detection," R. Sekar et al, ACM Computer and Communication Security, 2002.
• "A Fast Automaton-Based Method for Detecting Anomalous Program Behaviors," R. Sekar et al, IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy, 2001.
• "User-Level Infrastructure for System Call Interposition: A Platform for Intrusion Detection and Confinement," K. Jain and R. Sekar, ISOC Network and Distributed Systems Security Conference, 2000.

Journals:

• "Model-Based Analysis of Configuration Vulnerabilities," C. Ramakrishnan and R. Sekar, Journal of Computer Security, 2002.
• "Efficient Automata-Driven Subterm Unification," R. Ramesh, I.V. Ramakrishnan and R. Sekar, Theoretical Computer Science, 254 (1-2), 2001.

Other scholarly activity: grants, sabbaticals, software development, etc.:

Education-related:

• “Scholarship for Service in Information Assurance,” National Science Foundation, 2004--08.
• “Capacity Expansion in Information Assurance,” National Science Foundation, 2003--05.

Research and education related:

• “Model-Carrying Code: A new Approach to Mobile-Code Security,” Office of Naval Research, 2001--2005.
• “Model Checking for Detecting Computer System Vulnerabilities,” National Science Foundation (ITR), 2002-2006.
• “An Approach for Securing Systems Using Adaptive Intrusion Response,” National Science Foundation, 2002-2005.
• “Secure Mobile Code Execution Environment,” Computer Associates Inc., 2003-04.
• “A Model-Based Approach for Securing Software Systems,” National Science Foundation, 2001-04.

Scientific, professional, and honor societies of which you are a member:

Honors and awards:

• Service Excellence Award, Deparment of Computer Science, 2002-04.
• Promising Inventor Award, Research Foundation of SUNY, 2003.
• “ Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education,” Award by National Security Agency (NSA), 2002-2008.
• Research Excellence award, Department of Computer Science, 2000-02.
• U.S. DoD Critical Infrastructure Protection and Information Assurance Fellows award, 2001.

Courses taught this and last academic year term-by-term

Academic advising: 15

• Ph.D. students: 7
• M.S. students: 5
• Assigned advisor for 18 undergraduate students during 2004/2005 academic year.

Brief description of major research and scholarly activities:

My main research focus is on building secure software, and retro-fitting security on existing large-scale software. Specific topics of research include: language-based security, application of formal methods in security, intrusion detection, and intrusion recovery.