Cybersecurity Master's Program
Stevens is recognized by the National Security Agency as a 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, it and attracts significant funding for research initiatives, capacity-building, and instructional program development. Research in FocusSecurity and Usability for a New World.
Dr. Antonio Nicolosi's research includes 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.
Dr. Giuseppe Ateniese is the David and GG Farber Endowed Chair in Computer Science and department director at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is currently working on cloud security and machine learning applied to security and intelligence issues for which he received an IBM SUR Award. He is also investigating new security applications for decentralized computing based on the blockchain/bitcoin technology. He received the NSF CAREER Award for his research in privacy and security, and the Google Faculty Research Award and the IBM Faculty Award for his research on cloud security. Dr. Ateniese has contributed to areas such as proxy re-cryptography, anonymous communication, two-party computation, secure storage, and provable data possession. He has served in the program committees of international security conferences (such as ACM CCS, IEEE Oakland, and NDSS) and as panelist of the US National Science Foundation.
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.