Two New Security Faculty Join The Computer Science Department

Sven Dietrich and Antonio Nicolosi have joined the Computer Science department as new tenure-track faculty members in the areas of security and cryptography. Both will teach courses for the Cybersecurity undergraduate major as well as security courses at the graduate level.

Sven Dietrich joined the Computer Science Department as Assistant Professor in August. Prior to joining, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at CERT Research at Carnegie Mellon University and also held an appointment at the Carnegie Mellon University CyLab, a university-wide cybersecurity research and education initiative. He taught cryptography in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Duquesne University in Spring 2007. From 1997 to 2001, he was a senior security architect at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he observed and analyzed the first distributed denial-of-service attacks against the University of Minnesota in 1999. He taught Mathematics and Computer Science as adjunct faculty at Adelphi University, his alma mater, from 1991 to 1997. His research interests include computer and network security, anonymity, cryptoraphic protocols, and cryptography. His previous work has included a formal analysis of the secure sockets layer protocol (SSL), intrusion detection, analysis of distributed denial-of-service tools, and the security of IP communications in space. His publications include the recent book “Internet Denial of Service: Attack and Defense Mechanisms” (Prentice Hall, 2004), as well as the articles “Analyzing Distributed Denial of Service Tools: The Shaft Case” (2000) and “The 'mstream' Distributed Denial of Service Tool” (2000), and others on Active Network Defense, DDoS tool analysis, and survivability.

Antonio Nicolosi joined the Computer Science Department as Assistant Professor in August. Professor Nicolosi received his Ph.D. from NYU and spent the last two years as a research scientist with the Stanford Secure Computer Systems Group. He pursues research at the interface of Cryptography and Distributed Systems, with the goal of designing practical software systems whose security and privacy properties can be validated within the theory of modern Cryptography. He has also worked on peer-to-peer multicast systems, non-interactive zero knowledge, and lattice decoding algorithms.