Cybersecurity M.S. Degree

A National Research Center

Stevens is recognized by the National Security Agency as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research. Supporting this designation is the Center for the Advancement of Secure Systems and Information Assurance, which fosters multi-disciplinary collaboration and acts as a catalyst for research, education, and entrepreneurship in information assurance and cybersecurity. The NSA designation has established Stevens as a major research center in Cybersecurity, and attracts significant funding for research initiatives, capacity-building, and instructional program development.

Research in Focus

Security and Usability for a New World

Dr. Sven Dietrich researches computer and network security, anonymity, cryptographic protocols, and cryptography. His previous work has included a formal analysis of the secure sockets layer protocol, intrusion detection, analysis of distributed denial-of-service tools, and the security of IP communications in space. His publications include the book Internet Denial of Service: Attack and Defense Mechanisms (Prentice Hall, 2004), as well as recent articles on botnets. His involvement with CASSIA has been integral in Stevens attaining its NSA designations. As one of the pioneers in computer and network security, Dr. Dietrich observed and analyzed the first distributed denial-of-service attacks against the University of Minnesota while working as a senior security architect at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Dr. Antonio Nicolosi's research invcludes identity and authentication for user-centric environments, security and privacy in collaborative mobile computing, lattices and cryptography and P2PCast. Dr. Nicolosi has developed a prototype system for elections and voting by small and medium-sized constituencies, like the members of a professional society or the Faculty of a School or University. The system, called PIVot (Practical Internet Voting), leverages existing Internet technology, and attains voter anonymity guarantees comparable to the paper-based mail-in ballot system, while additionally providing each individual voter with evidence of accurate tallying. On the multi-university Nebula Project, funded by the NSF, Dr. Nicolosi will be working together with Stevens Ph.D. students to study methods of increasing performance while simultaneously strengthening resource-intensive cryptographic security tools.

Computer Science Department Director Professor Daniel Duchamp researches networking and operating systems (especially file systems), distributed systems, mobile computing, and Web performance issues. He is a participant in the NSF-funded FIND (Future Internet Design) project, a major new long-term initiative of the NSF NeTS research program. FIND invites the research community to consider what the requirements should be for a global network of 15 years from now, and how we could build such a network if we are not constrained by the current Internet. Dr. Duchamp is a member of IEEE, ACM, and USENIX, received NSF funding for his work in Session Layer Management of Network, and is a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator award.

Dr. Susanne Wetzel's research interests involve cryptography and algorithmic number theory. In the field of cryptography, her research is focused on wireless security, secret sharing, privacy, and biometrics, and her contributions range from analysis to protocol design. In algorithmic number theory, her research is centered on lattice theory, in particular on developing new algorithms and heuristics for lattice basis reduction. Dr. Wetzel works closely with the Cybersecurity program and coordinates NSF-funded education and capacity-building programs in the Department. She is also the PI on a recent NSF grant to study advanced solutions for secure and private computing through policy reconciliation.

Professional and Academic Opportunities

Cybersecurity is a high-growth field currently experiencing a demand far greater than the supply of trained professionals available. The M.S. in Cybersecurity has been designed specifically to train students for these high-demand careers protecting our complex information infrastructures, meeting both the needs of graduates as well as those in government and industry. The White House has reported that, in the coming years, as many as 30,000 new cybersecurity professionals are needed by the United States government alone. A complementary curriculum in both computational technologies and security administration is offered to produce competent graduates able to navigate a highly technical and fast-paced field.