Welcome to the home page of PragSec lab at Stony Brook University!

PragSec is a portmanteau word composed of the words Pragmatic and Security. These two words are core to the type of research that we conduct.

On the one hand, we focus on empirical, large-scale studies, in an effort to measure and understand an ever expading Internet and an increasingly complicated threat landscape. On the other hand, we develop real, pragmatic defense mechanisms that can detect and stop attackers today, and not some time in the future when the Internet will be a more well-designed set of protocols.

On an average day, we build crawlers, design honeypots, analyze suspicious domains, implement browser extensions, instrument smartphones, study cybercrime, and track the evolution of online tracking. You can learn more about the work we do by having a look at our publications.



People


 Faculty

Nick Nikiforakis
Nick Nikiforakis

 PhD Students

Johnny So
Johnny So
Christos Tsoukaladelis
Christos Tsoukaladelis
		Billy Tsouvalas
Billy Tsouvalas
Muhammad Muzammil
Muhammad Muzammil


 Alumni

NameDegree & YearFirst Appointment
Xigao Li PhD 2023Bloomberg
Brian Kondracki PhD 2023Jane Street
Babak Amin Azad PhD 2022Cloudflare
Lalith Harisha MS 2022ByteDance
Binoy Chitale MS 2022Microsoft
Anurag Yepuri MS 2022Google
Ian Buitenkant MS 2020Applied Visions
Meng Luo PhD 2020Postdoc at Northeastern University
Timothy Barron PhD 2020Lecturer at Yale University
Najmeh Miramirkhani PhD 2019Netskope
Pierre Laperdrix Postdoctoral researcher (2019)Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA)
Bhavesh Goyal MS 2018Apple
Eniola Abdul MS 2018Google
Oleksii Starov PhD 2018Palo Alto Networks
Ravikumar Rajendran MS 2018Facebook
Malini M. Venkatachari MS 2018Cohesity
Pratik Gaikar MS 2018Cohesity
Siddharth Rajendra KawarMS 2017Avere Systems
Karteek ParuchuriMS 2017Amazon Web Services
Vinayak MittalMS 2016Nutanix
Somesh GuptaMS 2016Morgan Stanley
Syed Sharique AhmadMS 2015Bank Of America
Roman PavlushchenkoMS 2015Tesla

Current Sponsors

Our work could not be done without the generous support of our sponsors. We gratefully acknowledge their support:

National Science Foundation
Office of Naval Research
Amazon Web Services
Mozilla

Past Sponsors

Cyber Research Institute
Linode
Ghostery
Data Transparency Lab

Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in research outputs (published papers, talks, blog postings etc.) are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.