• • •
if you are interested in working with me as a student, see my Grad info
page for graduate students.
Graduated PhD Students
Here is a "genealogy" of my 18 graduated PhD students.
Current Students
Larissa O'Brien
Larissa is currently on leave from Purdue, to return next year. She is interested in intrusion detection and forensics.
Selected Former Students
Here I've listed the students whose names you might find on research papers or software products out of my research projects. It is not a complete list of all the notable students who have worked with me, because the list would be too long to contain them all!
Sarika Agarwal
An MS thesis student, who worked with me in access control and trusted computing environments. Now with Qualcomm in California.
Hiralal Agrawal
Hira received his PhD in 1991. He is now working at Telcordia. His dissertation, Towards Automatic Debugging of Computer Programs, was done as part of the Spyder project in the SERC. Hira's co-advisor was Richard DeMillo.
Taimur Aslam
Taimur received his MS degree in 1995 for his research with the COAST Project. His MS thesis, A Taxonomy of Security Faults in Operating Systems, explored how to classify faults in Unix that led to security compromises. The classification can be used for testing and software development. Last I heard, Taimur was working at Motorola.
Florian Buchholz
Received his PhD in August 2005 and is now on the faculty of James Madison University. His dissertation was on embedding forensic support in a general-purpose OS file system, and was entitled Pervasive Binding of Labels to System Processes.
Serdar Cabuk
I was Serdar's co-advisor, with Carla Brodley at Tufts. His PhD dissertation involved exploration of how to create covert timing channels in the IP protocol, and how to discover those same types of channel. Serdar graduated in December, 2006. He is working at HP Labs, in Bristol, England.
Brian Carrier
Brian received his PhD in spring 2006 for his dissertation on a formal framework for digital forensic investigations. He is now a member of the research staff at Basis Technology.
Steve Chapin
Steve received his PhD in 1993.He did his dissertation, entitled Scheduling Support for an Internetwork of Heterogeneous, Autonomous Processors, as the core of the Messiahs Project.
Steve is now an Associate Professor at Syracuse University. He is the first of my former students to produce Ph.D. graduates of his own.
Mark Crosbie
Mark received his MS degree in 1995 working in the COAST Project. His research topic was in using "Artificial Life" to build active computer security defenses. He originated the idea of using numerous, autonomous agents for intrusion detection. Mark married Tanya Mastin, another former student. He is currently working for HP in Ireland.
Thomas Daniels
Tom received his Ph.D. in December 2002 after completing his dissertation, Reference Models for the Concealment and Observation of Origin Identity in Store and Forward Networks. He is on the faculty of Iowa State University.
Bryn Dole
Bryn received his MS degree in 1995 while working in the COAST Project. He was involved with development of methods of testing security firewalls and screens in networks. After working for a while at Sun Microsystems, Bryn left to be one of the founders of the Open Directory Project.
Kevin Du
Kevin received his PhD in 2001. He is now on the faculty at Syracuse University. His thesis was entitled A Study Of Several Specific Secure Two-Party Computation Problems. His co-advisor was Mike Atallah.
James Early
Advised by myself and Professor Carla Brodley 
(formerly with Purdue ECE), Jim graduated in August 2005. His thesis was on detecting anomalies in network traffic, and his dissertation was entitled Behavioral Feature Extraction for Network Anomaly Detection. He is on the CS faculty at SUNY Oswego.
Dan Farmer
Dan is now CTO of Elemental Security. He completed his undergraduate degree at Purdue in 1990. While at Purdue, he built the COPS static audit tool under my direction.
Rajeev Gopalakrishna
I was coadvisor for Rajeev with Jan Vitek. His thesis was about how to employ methods of static analysis to increase confidence in the secure operation of software. He received his Ph.D. in spring 2006. He joined the research staff at Intel Laboratories in Oregon.
Gene H. Kim
Gene completed his BS degree in 1993 and his MSCS at the University of Arizona. He worked with me on the Tripwire project through COAST, released on November 2, 1992. Gene is now CTO of Tripwire, Inc. Since 1999, Gene has been capturing and codifying how "best in class" organizations have IT operations, security, audit, management, and governance working together to solve common business objectives. This was codified in 2004, he co-wrote the Visible Ops Handbook, showing how IT organizations successfully transformed from good to great. Gene was named as a 2007 Outstanding Alumnus by Purdue CS.
Ivan Krsul
Ivan completed his PhD on the topic of Software Vulnerability Analysis in 1998. He constructed a large-scale database of system vulnerabilities, and then used this to explore their characteristics. His research was part of the COAST Project. He is now working at a start-up company, Arte Xacta, in his native Bolivia.
Ivan also did his MS thesis under my direction, entitled Authorship Analysis: Identifying the Author of a Program.
Ivan is the only repeat winner of the Maurice Halsted Software Engineering Award, given at Purdue each year.
Sandeep Kumar
Sandeep received his Ph.D. in August, 1995. His dissertation, Classification and Detection of Computer Intrusions developed a new approach to intrusion detection. His research was part of the COAST Project. He is currently working for RSA Security in Bangalore, India.
Benjamin Kuperman
Ben graduated in August 2004 and then joined the faculty of
Swarthmore College as a visiting assistant professor. Starting in the fall of 2006 he will be on the CS faculty of Oberlin College. His dissertation was entitled A Categorization of Computer Security Monitoring Systems and the Impact on the Design of Audit Sources.
Steve Lodin
Steve received his MS degree in 1996 while at Purdue as a GM Fellow. He worked with the COAST group while here, and is credited with discovering the Kerberos random number generator vulnerability - one of the 10 worst software bugs in history. Steve is currently working at Roche Diagnostics Corp as an IT Director.
Tanya Mastin
Tanya completed her BS degree in the spring of 1997. While at Purdue, she worked with COAST to redesign the entire on-line archive, including introducing a new database format to keep track of entries.
Tanya married Mark Crosbie, another former student, and the two now live in Ireland. Tanya is currently running her own photography business there, named "Giggles and Smiles."
Pascal Meunier
Pascal came to Purdue with a Ph.D. in biological sciences. He completed his M.S. under my direction, and is now working as a research scientist with CERIAS.
Stephanie Miller Bansal
Finished a M.S. thesis in security policy and infrastructure for a statewide education project in 1999. After a while working for HP in Indianapolis she joined the consulting practice of Deloitte & Touche in New York City.
Sofie Nystrom
Sofie completed her MS degree while working with us on forensics and network security. She worked for a whilein security and critical infrastructure protection in her native Norway with SINTEF, and then NSM. She is now working for Symantec in Norway.
Hsin (Sean) Pan
Sean received his PhD in 1993 and is now working at RFCyber, Inc. His dissertation, Debugging with Dynamic Instrumentation and Test-Based Information, was done as part of the Spyder project in the SERC. Hsin's co-advisor was Richard DeMillo.
Katherine Price
Kat completed an MS thesis in 1997 on the nature of audit trails in intrusion detection systems, entitled Host-based Misuse Detection and Conventional Operating Systems' Audit Data Collection. I am unsure what she is doing now.
Maja Pusara
I was Maja's co-advisor, with Carla Brodley at Tufts. Maja graduated in spring 2007 after completing a dissertation on the topic of dynamic reauthentication based on computer mouse activity. She is currently working for Ab Initio in Boston.
Christoph Schuba
Christoph's PhD topic involved the development of a reference model for firewalls, and an implementation of a proof-of-concept on native ATM technology. He received his PhD in 1997 for his dissertation On the Modeling, Design and Implementation of Firewall Technology. He is currently a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems.
Christoph did his MS thesis under my direction, entitled Addressing Weaknesses in the Domain Name System.
Karyl Stein
Karyl completed his BS degree in 1998. While working with the COAST Project, he helped design our firewall testing testbed, as well as contributing to several other projects.
Aurobindo (Robin) Sundaram
Robin completed his MS degree in 1997. He initially worked in corporate security for Schlumberger. A few years later, he joined Choicepoint as associate VP of security.
Chonchanok Viravan
Nok received her PhD in 1994 for her dissertation
Enhancing Debugging Technology. This was the final part of the Spyder project in the SERC. Nok is now President of IFBPW. She was named as a 2007 Outstanding Alumna by Purdue CS.
Keith Watson
Keith received his BS degree in 1997. He worked with me on developing methods of testing security software and firewalls. After a while at Sun Labs, Keith left and came back to CERIAS as a research engineer, working on our intrusion detection and security architecture projects.
Steve Weeber
Steve received his MS in 1992 and then took a job with the CIAC at LLNL. He worked with me on several COAST projects, including software forensics and OPUS. He is currently working at XO Communications doing network security design and incident response.
Paul Williams
Paul joined the faculty at the AIr Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) after his 
graduation in August 2005. Paul is a major in the US Air Force. His dissertation was on using a co-processor to monitor security-related behavior of a running system. His dissertation was entitled CUPIDS: Increasing Information System Security Through the Use of Dedicated Co-Processing.
Diego Zamboni
Diego received his Ph.D. in 2001 and has joined the research staff of IBM Laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland. His dissertation was entitled Using Internal Sensors for Computer Intrusion Detection
Updated: 02/28/08
© 2004-2007 E. H. Spafford
spaf@purdue.edu