Jed Crandall's Website @ U.N.M.

Jedidiah R. Crandall
Associate Professor, University of New Mexico, Department of Computer Science
Office number FEC 335 (in the Farris Engineering Center)
Fall 2013 office hours: Tuesday/Thursday 9:30am to 11:00am

GPG info

The principle that guides my research is this: it shouldn't be so easy for those who control the Internet to exercise censorship and surveillance without full transparency. My research group develops cutting-edge techniques for inferring what's really going on on the Internet and in software that connects to the Internet. To get a good idea of what we're working on most recently, see this USENIX Security 2010 paper that we're using as the basis for some advanced Internet measurement techniques, our recent USENIX Security 2013 paper about Weibo censorship, a FOCI 2012 paper about man-in-the-middle attacks on third-party software updates, or this paper that is joint work with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto about chat program censorship and surveillance.

Students: I'm currently actively working with six and five halves graduate students: Geoffrey Alexander, Peipei Cheng, Pravallika Devineni (co-advised with Michalis Faloutsos), Roya Ensafi, Antonio Espinoza, Maria Khater (co-advised with Rafael Fierro), Stephen Harding, Jeffrey Knockel (co-advised with Jared Saia), Jong Park, Peiyou Song (co-advised with George Luger), and Xu Zhang. I have graduated two Ph.D. students, Mohammed Al-Saleh (now a tenure-track faculty member at the Jordan University of Science and Technology) and Bilal Shebaro (now a post-doc at Purdue University).

Teaching: This semester I'm teaching CS 485/ECE 440/CS 585: Computer Networks. For Spring 2013 I taught CS 491/591 (Computer and Network Security), and co-taught CS 444/544 (Introduction to Cybersecurity) with Antonio Espinoza. Past courses are here. For a cool way to teach information flow and covert channels in your class, see http://werewolves.cs.unm.edu/.

More information: You can also check out my full list of publications, professional activities and some other stuff.

Funding: I'm grateful for my research to be supported by the National Science Foundation CAREER, Trusted Computing, Secure and Trustworth Cyberspaces (SaTC), Research Experiences for Undergraduates, and EPSCoR programs, and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency CRASH program. Past funding has also included a seedling from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Academic background: I received my Ph.D. in June 2007 from the Department of Computer Science at U.C. Davis. My undergraduate degree is from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

RECENT RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS:

In collaboration with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the work that Jeff (co-advised with Jared Saia) did on TOM-Skype and Sina UC censorship and surveillance has been extended. We have published a paper and posted supporting data with some cool visualizations by Greg Wiseman at https://china-chats.net/.
In collaboration with Rice University, an independent researcher, and an REU student of mine from Bowdoin College (David Phipps), our work on Weibo will appear at USENIX Security 2013.
Peiyou (co-advised with George Luger) presented a paper at the 6th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (PDF here). Also, her NLP KE 2012 paper (PDF here) won a Best Paper award and she was asked to give the keynote talk.
Tony and I developed a Java version of dynamic information flow tracking based on taint as a vector, with funding from DARPA and the NSF. The Java version can be downloaded here, and a document about its operation is here. A much-improved version written in C will be available soon.
Both Jeff and I will be presenting papers at FOCI 2012, PDFs are here and here.
Roya will be presenting a paper she coauthored with myself and Mike Jacobi titled, "Students Who Don't Understand Information Flow Should be Eaten: An Experience Paper" at CSET 2012. PDF is here.
My collaborator, Daniela Oliveira, presented a paper we coauthored titled, "Holographic Vulnerability Studies: Vulnerabilities as Fractures in Interpretation as Information Flows Across Abstraction Boundaries" at NSPW 2012, and was subsequently asked to present the paper at ACSAC 2012 as well. A PDF is here.
Bilal successfully defended his dissertation, which is available here.
Mohammed successfully defended his dissertation, which is available here.
Tony and Jeff both presented papers at FOCI 2011, which can be downloaded on my publications page. For supplementary materials on TOM-Skype see here. Jeff's paper was joint work with Jared Saia.
Roya presented her work on idle port scans at USENIX Security 2010. Watch the video here. This was joint work with Jong Park and Deepak Kapur.
Jong presented his work on the HTML response filtering on China's Internet at ICDCS 2010.