Research

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Group

Advanced Network Architecture Group

The challenge that motivates the ANA group is to foster a healthy future for the Internet. The interplay of private sector investment, public sector regulation and public interest advocacy, as well as the global diversity in drivers and aspirations, makes for an uncertain future.

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Leads

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

David Clark

Karen Sollins

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Research Group

Computation Structures Group

Our mission is fostering the creation and development of high-performance, reliable and secure computing systems that are easy to interact with.

+23

Leads

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+23

Research Group

Cryptography and Information Security Group

We seek to develop techniques for securing tomorrow's global information infrastructure by exploring theoretical foundations, near-term practical applications, and long-range speculative research.

Leads

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Center

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Our mission is to work with policy makers and cybersecurity technologists to increase the trustworthiness and effectiveness of interconnected digital systems.

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Hal Abelson

David Clark

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Weitzner

Hal Abelson

David Clark

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Research Group

Lecturers

Lecturers in CSAIL

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Research Group

Data Systems Group

We conduct research on all areas of database systems and information management.

+16

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

+16

Research Group

Software Design Group

Our goal is to find better ways to make software, and ways to make software better.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Jackson

27 Project Results matching all criteria

Project

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

We extract the underlying hidden relations from the given location-based datasets (e.g. GPS data) and we estimate (approximate) the hidden a social network in the data by using a particular data reduction algorithm (i.e., by using coresets).

Daniela Rus

Leads

Daniela Rus

Research Areas

Daniela Rus

Project

Automated Attack Tree Generation for Critical Infrastructure

Using AI methods, we are developing an attack tree generator that automatically enumerates cyberattack vectors for industrial control systems in critical infrastructure (electric grids, water networks and transportation systems). The generator can quickly assess cyber risk for a system at scale.

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Howard Shrobe

Project

Securing IoT

IoT devices primarily use free embedded Linux which has many security flaws. We are conducting penetration tests on IoT and developing a secure version of embedded Linux.

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Internet of Things

Howard Shrobe

Project

Secure Public-Key Distribution

Our work aims to ensure nobody's listening in on your online activities, whether you are doing online banking or texting your friends via WhatsApp.

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Leads

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Project

Security by Design for Cyberphysical Systems

An approach to reducing risks of attack on cyberphysical infrastructure (such as water purification plants and electric grids) with new software design and analysis techniques.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Daniel Jackson

Project

Denial of Service Mitigation through Protocol Design

We aim to better understand the features of network protocols that facilitate denial of service attacks, in order to design more robust protocols and architectures in the future and evaluate existing designs more accurately.

Karen Sollins

Leads

Karen Sollins

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Karen Sollins

Project

Data Garbling: Computing on Encrypted Data

We are investigating the limits of computing on encrypted data, with a focus on the private outsourcing of computation over sensitive data.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Data Civilizer

Data scientists universally report that they spend at least 80% of their time finding data sets of interest, accessing them, cleaning them and assembling them into a unified whole.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Database Design

The conventional wisdom described in all text books for performing database design is never followed in practice.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Adversarial Cyber Security

Our goal is to understand the nature of cyber security arms races between malicious and bonafide parties. Our vision is autonomous cyber defenses that anticipate and take measures against counter attacks.

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Una-May O'Reilly

Project

Keys Under Doormats

Our report argues that giving the government special access to data poses major security risks

Daniel Weitzner

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Weitzner

Project

Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors

Report warns of hacking risk to electric grid, oil pipelines, and other critical infrastructure

Joel Brenner

Leads

Joel Brenner

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Joel Brenner

Project

Splinter: Practical Private Queries on Public Data

Splinter protects users’ queries on public data and scales to realistic applications.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Secure Demand Paging for Trusted Execution Environments

This project focuses on altering the way trusted execution environments handle paging to decouple page access patterns from the control flow of the program, preventing an attacker from using these access patterns to learn information about program secrets.

Srini Devadas

Leads

Srini Devadas

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Project

Sanctum Secure Processor

An open-source, minimal secure processor

Ilia Lebedev

Leads

Ilia Lebedev

Research Areas

Ilia Lebedev

Project

Practical Secure Computation

Our goal is to bridge theory and practice to create infrastructure that allow computation and multi-party computation without compromising privacy.

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Leads

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Research Areas

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Project

Towards Adversarially Robust Deep Neural Networks

We work towards a principled understanding of the non-robust nature of deep learning classifiers and build approaches to training reliably robust classifiers.

Aleksander Madry

Leads

Aleksander Madry

Research Areas

Graphics & Vision

Impact Areas

Aleksander Madry

Project

A new way of handling all-to-all broadcast

We design a new all-to-all broadcasts scheme with significantly less communication cost using aggregate signatures.

Alin Tomescu

Jun Wan

Leads

Jun Wan

Research Areas

Alin Tomescu

Jun Wan

Project

Return of the Byzantine Generals

This project studies new solutions to the Byzantine General Problem and its applications in distributed systems and cryptography.

Srini Devadas

Leads

Srini Devadas

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Project

Scaling strong anonymity

Our goal is to provide provable and practical anonymity to a large number of users online.

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Leads

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Project

Basing Cryptography on Structured Hardness

We aim to base a variety of cryptographic primitives on complexity theoretic assumptions. We focus on the assumption that there exist highly structured problems --- admitting so called "zero-knowledge" protocols --- that are nevertheless hard to compute

Leads

Research Areas

Project

Poirot: Secure Protocol Implementation by Design

Even formally verified protocols that have been faithfully implemented have been found to have security vulnerabilities. A new framework eliminates such vulnerabilities by design.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Vuvuzela: Metadata private messaging

Vuvuzela is the first messaging system that provides differential privacy for users' metadata.

David Lazar

Nickolai Zeldovich

Leads

David Lazar

Nickolai Zeldovich

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Decentralized Information Group

David Lazar

Nickolai Zeldovich

Project

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

We are developing a general framework that enforces privacy transparently enabling different kinds of machine learning to be developed that are automatically privacy preserving.

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Research Areas

Kami: A Modular Deductive Hardware Verification Platform

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

19 People Results matching all criteria

Anish Athalye

Graduate Student

PhD student in PDOS

E aathalye@mit.edu

RM 32-G978A

PhD student in PDOS

PI
Core/Dual

Adam Chlipala

Associate Professor

Programming languages, formal methods, security & privacy, systems

E adamc@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8439

Lead

Compilation Using Correct-by-Construction Program Synthesis

Programming Languages & Verification

Hemiola: Structural Design and Proof of Cache-Coherence Protocols

Member

Compilation Using Correct-by-Construction Program Synthesis

Programming with spaces

FSCQ: File-system verification

Programming languages, formal methods, security & privacy, systems

PI
Core/Dual

David Clark

Senior Research Scientist

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

E ddc@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6003

Lead

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors

Member

Internet architectures, communications policy, security

PI
Core/Dual

Srini Devadas

Professor

Architectures, security, computer-aided design

E devadas@csail.mit.edu

T 253-0454

Lead

Using Bitcoin to prevent identify theft

Secure Demand Paging for Trusted Execution Environments

Scaling strong anonymity

Return of the Byzantine Generals

Member

Sanctum Secure Processor

A new way of handling all-to-all broadcast

Architectures, security, computer-aided design

Gregory Falco

Postdoctoral Associate

Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.

E gfalco@mit.edu

Dr. Falco is a hacker and expert in IoT and IIoT cybersecurity.

PI
Core/Dual

Frans Kaashoek

Professor

Systems, networks, architectures

E kaashoek@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7149

Lead

Scaling Filesystems To Many Cores

Member

Noria: a new data-flow system for web applications

FSCQ: File-system verification

Systems, networks, architectures

David Lazar

Graduate Student

David Lazar is a PhD student in systems security

E lazard@mit.edu

RM 32-G978B

Lead

Vuvuzela: Metadata private messaging

Member

David Lazar is a PhD student in systems security

Ilia Lebedev

Graduate Student

E ilebedev@csail.mit.edu

Lead

Sanctum Secure Processor

Member

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

Sanctum Secure Processor

William Moses

Graduate Student

E wmoses@mit.edu

Member

Supertech Research Group

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Graduate Student

Privacy and Big Data

E vaik@mit.edu

Lead

Member

Decentralized Information Group

Privacy and Big Data

PI
Core/Dual

Una-May O'Reilly

Principal Research Scientist

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

E unamay@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6437

Lead

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

MOOC Learner Project: Data science for e-learning

Adversarial Cyber Security

GIGABEATS: Data science for medical sensor data

Applied AI and ML in cybersecurity, healthcare, education

PI
Core/Dual

Martin Rinard

Professor

Systems, programming languages and verification

E rinard@csail.mit.edu

T 258-6922

Member

Systems, programming languages and verification

PI
Core/Dual

Ronald Rivest

Institute Professor

Cryptography, cybersecurity, RSA public-key encryption

E rivest@mit.edu

T 253-5880

Lead

Member

Keys Under Doormats

Cryptography, cybersecurity, RSA public-key encryption

PI
Core/Dual

Daniela Rus

Director

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

E rus@csail.mit.edu

T 258-7567

RM 32/ 32-368/ 374

Lead

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

Safety Standards for Autonomous Vehicles

Soft Contact Modeling

Practical Secure Computation

Self-Driving Vehicles

Robust Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

Brain-Controlled Robots

Planning in Congestion for Autonomous Vehicles

Socially-Compliant Behavior for Autonomous Driving

Coresets for Machine Learning Algorithms

M-Blocks Modular Robotics

Robot Compiler

Distributed Robot Garden

Route and Motion Planning for Mobility-on-Demand with Rules of the Road

Member

Social Network Extraction from GPS Datasets with Coresets

Task-Driven Co-Optimization Of Articulated Robots

Wearable Blind Navigation

Drones that Drive

Better Models for Ride-Sharing

SoFi - The Soft Robotic Fish

CSAIL director, robotics, AI, data science, privacy

PI
Core/Dual

Howard Shrobe

Principal Research Scientist

Architectures, cybersecurity, web policy

E hes@csail.mit.edu

T 253-7877

Lead

RADMAX

Risk-aware Network Resource Allocation

Automated Attack Tree Generation for Critical Infrastructure

Securing IoT

Member

Architectures, cybersecurity, web policy

PI
Core/Dual

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Associate Professor

Cryptography, encryption

E vinodv@csail.mit.edu

T 324-8444

Lead

Splinter: Practical Private Queries on Public Data

Member

Cryptography, encryption

PI
Core/Dual

Daniel Weitzner

Principal Research Scientist

Web policy, cybersecurity, web architecture

E djweitzner@csail.mit.edu

T 253-8036

Lead

The Car Can Explain!

Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors

Keys Under Doormats

Member

Distributed Co-prime Sampling Algorithms

Web policy, cybersecurity, web architecture

Hanshen Xiao

Graduate Student

E hsxiao@MIT.EDU

Lead

Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Optimization

PI
Core/Dual

Nickolai Zeldovich

Associate Professor

Operating systems, hardware, programming languages

E nickolai@csail.mit.edu

T 253-6005

Lead

Scaling Filesystems To Many Cores

Vuvuzela: Metadata private messaging

Member

FSCQ: File-system verification

Operating systems, hardware, programming languages

2 News Results matching all criteria

Security & Cryptography Cybersecurity

April 24 '18

MIT engineering students team up with Georgetown lawyers-in-training on internet privacy legislation

Every spring, engineering students from MIT and law students from Georgetown University overcome the distance between their institutions and disciplines in a semester-long flurry of virtual classroom meetings and late-night Google hangout sessions, culminating in presentations to policy experts in DC.

MIT engineering students team up with Georgetown lawyers-in-training on internet privacy legislation

AI & Machine Learning Security & Cryptography Big Data Cybersecurity Internet of Things Transportation

November 02 '17

Fooling neural networks w/3D-printed objects

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of “neural networks” are increasingly used in technologies like self-driving cars to be able to see and recognize objects. Such systems could even help with tasks like identifying explosives in airport security lines.

Fooling neural networks w/3D-printed objects

8 Group Results

Research Group

Advanced Network Architecture Group

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Leads

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

David Clark

Karen Sollins

David Clark

Karen Sollins

Research Group

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Our vision is data-driven machine learning systems that advance the quality of healthcare, the understanding of cyber arms races and the delivery of online education.

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Group

Computation Structures Group

Our mission is fostering the creation and development of high-performance, reliable and secure computing systems that are easy to interact with.

+23

Leads

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Srini Devadas

Daniel Sanchez

Armando Solar-Lezama

Arvind

+23

Research Group

Cryptography and Information Security Group

We seek to develop techniques for securing tomorrow's global information infrastructure by exploring theoretical foundations, near-term practical applications, and long-range speculative research.

Leads

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Shafi Goldwasser

Silvio Micali

Ronald Rivest

Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Butler Lampson

Research Group

Data Systems Group

We conduct research on all areas of database systems and information management.

+16

Leads

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Sam Madden

Michael Stonebraker

Tim Kraska

+16

Research Center

Internet Policy Research Initiative

Our mission is to work with policy makers and cybersecurity technologists to increase the trustworthiness and effectiveness of interconnected digital systems.

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Hal Abelson

David Clark

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Weitzner

Hal Abelson

David Clark

Lalana Kagal

Karen Sollins

Gerald Sussman

Research Group

Lecturers

Lecturers in CSAIL

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Research Group

Software Design Group

Our goal is to find better ways to make software, and ways to make software better.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lead

Daniel Jackson

27 Project Results

Project

A new way of handling all-to-all broadcast

We design a new all-to-all broadcasts scheme with significantly less communication cost using aggregate signatures.

Alin Tomescu

Jun Wan

Leads

Jun Wan

Research Areas

Anyscale Learning for All ALFA

Alin Tomescu

Jun Wan

Project

Adversarial Cyber Security

Una-May O'Reilly

Leads

Una-May O'Reilly

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Una-May O'Reilly

Project

Alloy

Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them. It has been used in a wide range of applications from finding holes in security mechanisms to designing telephone switching networks. Hundreds of projects have used Alloy for design analysis, for verification, for simulation, and as a backend for many other kinds of analysis and synthesis tools, and Alloy is currently being taught in courses worldwide.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Automated Attack Tree Generation for Critical Infrastructure

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Howard Shrobe

Project

Basing Cryptography on Structured Hardness

Leads

Research Areas

Project

Data Civilizer

Data scientists universally report that they spend at least 80% of their time finding data sets of interest, accessing them, cleaning them and assembling them into a unified whole.

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Michael Stonebraker

Sam Madden

Project

Data Garbling: Computing on Encrypted Data

We are investigating the limits of computing on encrypted data, with a focus on the private outsourcing of computation over sensitive data.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Database Design

The conventional wisdom described in all text books for performing database design is never followed in practice.

Michael Stonebraker

Leads

Michael Stonebraker

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Advanced Network Architecture Group

Michael Stonebraker

Project

Denial of Service Mitigation through Protocol Design

Karen Sollins

Leads

Karen Sollins

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Karen Sollins

Project

Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors

Report warns of hacking risk to electric grid, oil pipelines, and other critical infrastructure

Joel Brenner

Leads

Joel Brenner

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Joel Brenner

Project

Keys Under Doormats

Our report argues that giving the government special access to data poses major security risks

Daniel Weitzner

Leads

Daniel Weitzner

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Weitzner

Project

Poirot: Secure Protocol Implementation by Design

Even formally verified protocols that have been faithfully implemented have been found to have security vulnerabilities. A new framework eliminates such vulnerabilities by design.

Daniel Jackson

Leads

Daniel Jackson

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Daniel Jackson

Project

Practical Secure Computation

Our goal is to bridge theory and practice to create infrastructure that allow computation and multi-party computation without compromising privacy.

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Leads

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Research Areas

Daniela Rus

Danny Feldman

Project

Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Optimization

To enable privacy preservation in decentralized optimization, differential privacy is the most commonly used approach. However, under such scenario, the trade-off between accuracy (even efficiency) and privacy is inevitable. In this project, distributed numerical optimization scheme incorporated with lightweight cryptographic information sharing are explored. The affect on the convergence rate from network topology is considered.

Hanshen Xiao

Leads

Hanshen Xiao

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Decentralized Information Group

Hanshen Xiao

Project

PrivacyML - A Privacy Preserving Framework for Machine Learning

We are developing a general framework that enforces privacy transparently enabling different kinds of machine learning to be developed that are automatically privacy preserving.

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Leads

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Lalana Kagal

Vaikkunth Mugunthan

Project

Random Graph with Applications in MPC

To explore how randomness in connectivity can improve the performance of secure multi-party computation (MPC) and the properties of communication graph to support MPC.

Leads

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Project

Return of the Byzantine Generals

This project studies new solutions to the Byzantine General Problem and its applications in distributed systems and cryptography.

Srini Devadas

Leads

Srini Devadas

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Project

Sanctum Secure Processor

An open-source, minimal secure processor

Ilia Lebedev

Leads

Ilia Lebedev

Research Areas

Ilia Lebedev

Project

Scaling strong anonymity

Our goal is to provide provable and practical anonymity to a large number of users online.

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Leads

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Albert Kwon

Project

Secure Demand Paging for Trusted Execution Environments

Srini Devadas

Leads

Srini Devadas

Research Areas

Srini Devadas

Project

Secure Public-Key Distribution

Our work aims to ensure nobody's listening in on your online activities, whether you are doing online banking or texting your friends via WhatsApp.

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Leads

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Ioan Tomescu Nicolescu

Project

Securing IoT

IoT devices primarily use free embedded Linux which has many security flaws. We are conducting penetration tests on IoT and developing a secure version of embedded Linux.

Howard Shrobe

Leads

Howard Shrobe

Research Areas

Impact Areas

Internet of Things

Howard Shrobe

Project

Security by Design for Cyberphysical Systems