engineering at northeastern | CA M P U S B E AT
Cybersecurity: Your Secrets Are Safe with Us Northeastern researchers are at the forefront of cybersecurity research, protecting everything from the phone in your pocket to the city of the future.
BY AND LARGE, the constantly connected and ever-growing internet that is so ubiquitous to everyday life is being run on an infrastructure that was created in the 1970s and 1980s. “The world was different then; things like privacy weren’t baked into the system,” says Associate Professor Kaushik Chowdhury, electrical and computer engineering. “Now that devices have gotten so much faster, but the core network is still the same, we are working to learn the proper offenses and defenses to keep our information and ourselves safer.”
Institute of Information Assurance
Northeastern is at the cutting edge of cybersecurity research with a number of on-site research centers and institutes dedicated to various aspects of this burgeoning and deeply specialized field. Professor Engin Kirda, jointly appointed in computer sciences and electrical and computer engineering (ECE), is the director of Northeastern’s Institute of Information Assurance (IIA), which focuses on issues of cybersecurity and privacy. Kirda and
his multidisciplinary team from across Northeastern’s colleges of engineering, computer science, and social sciences considers everything from the theoretical (such as encryption and data security), to the practical (such as how users recover from attacks). “Cybersecurity itself is an issue that has been around for at least 15 years, but only recently has the internet become a critical infrastructure to our everyday lives,” says Kirda. “While the technology giants like Google and Facebook are, of course, interested in cybersecurity, so is everyone else because everything is connected, including your home and all your devices.” In addition to large tech organizations, the IIA works with many other funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Army and Air Force. Because of their ongoing research and education, the Institute contributes to Northeastern’s stature as a National Security Agency/Department of Homeland Security Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research and Education.
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