Michael Collins
University of Southern California, CA·Computer Science
Detecting cyberattacks is still largely manual. When organizations share security data, they mostly share indicators of compromise: known signs, such as specific files or addresses, already tied to attacks.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
cybersecurity
intrusion detection
network security
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Develop an intrusion detection approach in which organizations diagnose suspicious events by posing targeted queries about other organizations' operational state.
- Design specialized cryptographic protocols for posing and answering cross-organization queries while minimizing leakage of private operational data.
- Create mechanisms that motivate organizations to join these data exchanges, and methods to choose which partners to query for the highest-quality answers.
More about the research
Producing those indicators is slow, and each organization sees only its own network. This makes it hard to tell whether an odd event is part of a wider attack.
Why it matters
Companies and institutions defending their networks often cannot see attacks that span several organizations. Privacy-preserving queries between organizations could help security teams diagnose intrusions faster without exposing sensitive internal data. This could strengthen defenses across many organizations at once.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bradley Reaves
North Carolina State University, NC·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop new techniques, including threat intelligence and call audio analysis, to detect abusive robocalling actors in the telephone network.
Alexandra Boldyreva
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Computer Science
Design a biometric-based authentication and key reconstruction protocol that is highly resistant to brute-force (exhaustive search) attacks on fingerprint or facial data.
Jason LeGrow
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Computer Science
Construct post-quantum blind signatures, threshold signatures and multisignatures based on lattices, error-correcting codes and group actions such as isogenies, maps between elliptic curves.
The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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