Sven Dietrich

Stevens Institute of Technology
Department of Computer Science
Castle Point on Hudson
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA

Phone: +1 201 216 8078
Fax: +1 201 216 8249
email: spock AT cs DOT stevens DOT edu

Office hours: by appointment

Program Committees: TRUST 2012, ACSAC 2012, ESORICS 2012.
Program Chair: 3rd Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research (WECSR 2012), March 2012.
General Chair: Security and Privacy Workshops 2012.
Recent Program Committees: NDSS 2012, EC2ND 2011, AISec 2011, DIMVA 2011, CISSE 2011, IEEE/SADFE 2011, ACSAC 2011, AISec 2010, EC2ND 2010.
Organizing Committees: International Financial Cryptography Association, IEEE CS Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, Security and Privacy Workshops.

Brief Bio:

I joined the faculty in the Computer Science Department at the Stevens Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor in the fall of 2007. I previously worked at CERT, located at Carnegie Mellon University, as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff from 2001 to 2007. I was also adjunct faculty at Carnegie Mellon's CyLab (2003-2007) and briefly in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Duquesne University in Spring 2007. Prior to that, I was a Senior Security Architect at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (1997-2001).

Research Interests:

My interests are in computer and network security, cryptography, anonymity, and privacy. In network security, my areas are in denial of service and malware (DDoS, botnets), and I have some interests in anti-phishing (I contributed to the technology in the anti-phishing startup Wombat Security Technologies). For cryptography, I look at cryptographic aspects of malware, and have interests in verification of cryptographic protocols.

Teaching:

Spring 2012: CS 675 Threats, Exploits, and Countermeasures.

Fall 2011: CS 576 Secure Systems, CS 577 Cybersecurity Lab.

Spring 2011: CS 675 Threats, Exploits, and Countermeasures.

Fall 2010: CS 576 Secure Systems, CS 577 Cybersecurity Lab.

Spring 2010: CS 675 Secure Computer Systems.

Fall 2009: CS 600 Algorithms, CS 665 Network Forensics.

Spring 2009: CS 665 Cybersecurity Forensics.

Fall 2008: CS 385 Data Structures and Algorithms II.

Spring 2008: CS 675 Secure Computer Systems.

Select publications:

- Experiments in P2P botnet detection, by Lionel Riviere, Sven Dietrich, in IT Oldenbourg Journal, Special Issue on Reactive Security, it - Information Technology Vol. 54, No. 2, 04/2012.

- SkyNET: A 3G-Enabled Mobile Attack Drone and Stealth Botmaster, by Theodore Reed, Joseph Geis, and Sven Dietrich, in Proceedings of the 5th Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 2011), August 2011. Project page is here.

- Building An Active Computer Security Ethics Community, by David Dittrich, Michael Bailey, and Sven Dietrich, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, July/August 2011.

- Friends of an Enemy: Identifying Local Members of Peer-to-Peer Botnets Using Mutual Contacts, with Baris Coskun, Nasir Memon, published in Proceedings of ACSAC 2010, December 2010. Acceptance rate: 17%.

- David Dittrich, Michael Bailey, Sven Dietrich. Towards Community Standards for Ethical Behavior in Computer Security Research. Stevens CS Technical Report 2009-1, 20 April 2009. Most recent draft is here.

- David Dittrich, Sven Dietrich. Discovery techniques for P2P botnets, Stevens CS Technical Report 2008-4, September 2008. Revised April 2009.

- David Dittrich, Sven Dietrich. P2P as botnet command and control: a deeper insight, in Proceedings of the 2008 3rd International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software (Malware), pp. 46-63, October 2008 ("Best Paper" award winner)

- Jelena Mirkovic, Sven Dietrich, David Dittrich, Peter Reiher. Internet Denial of Service: Attack and Defense Mechanisms, Prentice Hall PTR, 2004.

Students:

- Tadas Vilkeliskis (Technogenesis Undergraduate Summer Scholar, 2009)

- Rich Catena (Post-MS, 2008-2009)

- Ralph Mattiaccio (Summer Scholar, 2010-2011)

- Lionel Riviere (Visiting MS Student, 2011)

- Sean Shoufu Luo (PhD student, 2011-now)

- Sadia Akhter (PhD student, 2012-now)

I am always looking for good undergraduate and graduate students interested in, among others, the research topics above and wanting to pursue a degree at Stevens. If you think you are the right person, please send me a brief statement to that effect, your background, and what type of projects you might work on. Generic e-mails of the type "I'm interested in your research" without further explanation are unlikely to be answered. Internships are not generally offered.

More info:

- I am an affiliated professor at the Computer Science department at KAIST.

- See my private home page.

Last updated April 12, 2012.