Computer Security Lab: Rice University

Rice’s Computer Security Lab started in 1998 when Dan Wallach joined Rice University’s Department of Computer Science. Most of our work focuses on designing stronger systems for the Internet. To do this, however, requires studying how existing systems fail. Typically, finding a security hole is the easy part, where engineering a system to resist security attacks is a difficult endeavor.

People

Dan Wallach is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He earned his bachelor’s at the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD at Princeton University. His research involves computer security and the issues of building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Wallach began his security career in 1995 when he and his colleagues found serious flaws in the security of Java applets; an attacker could use your web browser to hijack your entire computer. Wallach has also studied security issues that occur in distributed and peer-to-peer systems. Wallach, along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, co-authored a groundbreaking study that reported significant flaws in Diebold’s AccuVote-TS electronic voting system. He has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the U.S., Mexico, and the European Union.

Funding

The Rice security lab is supported by the National Science Foundation (grants CNS-0524211 and CNS-0509297) as well as by generous gifts from IBM, Microsoft, and Schlumberger.

Site credits

Jayna Wallach designed the “Sherlock Owl” logo. The HTML and CSS for the original Security Lab website wouldn’t have been possible without help from David Bjorgen. In 2006, the site was converted to use WordPress for content management.