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
PhD Students
Ruining Yang
Narong Chaiwut
Benny Zheng
Alumni
| Name | Degree & Year | First Appointment |
|---|---|---|
| Christos Tsoukaladelis | PhD 2026 | Cloudflare |
| Billy Tsouvalas | PhD 2026 | Cloudflare |
| Muhammad Muzammil | PhD 2026 | Palo Alto Networks |
| Johnny So | PhD 2025 | Meta |
| Xigao Li | PhD 2023 | Bloomberg |
| Brian Kondracki | PhD 2023 | Jane Street |
| Babak Amin Azad | PhD 2022 | Cloudflare |
| Lalith Harisha | MS 2022 | ByteDance |
| Binoy Chitale | MS 2022 | Microsoft |
| Anurag Yepuri | MS 2022 | |
| Ian Buitenkant | MS 2020 | Applied Visions |
| Meng Luo | PhD 2020 | Postdoc at Northeastern University |
| Timothy Barron | PhD 2020 | Lecturer at Yale University |
| Najmeh Miramirkhani | PhD 2019 | Netskope |
| Pierre Laperdrix | Postdoctoral researcher (2019) | Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA) |
| Bhavesh Goyal | MS 2018 | Apple |
| Eniola Abdul | MS 2018 | |
| Oleksii Starov | PhD 2018 | Palo Alto Networks |
| Ravikumar Rajendran | MS 2018 | |
| Malini M. Venkatachari | MS 2018 | Cohesity |
| Pratik Gaikar | MS 2018 | Cohesity |
| Siddharth Rajendra Kawar | MS 2017 | Avere Systems |
| Karteek Paruchuri | MS 2017 | Amazon Web Services |
| Vinayak Mittal | MS 2016 | Nutanix |
| Somesh Gupta | MS 2016 | Morgan Stanley |
| Syed Sharique Ahmad | MS 2015 | Bank Of America |
| Roman Pavlushchenko | MS 2015 | Tesla |
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
Past Sponsors
Cyber Research Institute
Linode
Ghostery
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.