Mobile/Cloud Computing and Cybersecurity

As computing has largely moved to mobile devices and the cloud, new challenges have arisen compared to stationary, local, and physically-secure, in-house servers. While some challenges stem from requirements imposed on computing reliability and energy efficiency, other challenges are related to data security and privacy, both in storage and transmission. Some of these challenges can be attacked at the hardware level, including the development of optical interconnects and integrated photonic devices, quantum communications and computing, green and high-performance computing, System-on-chip (SoC) VLSI security, and cyber/wireless security and privacy. Other challenges require software-based solutions, such as the detection and analysis of malware attacks, detection of clickjacking attacks, software obfuscation for software-hardware attack mitigation, etc. Activities in this area build on ECE’s strengths in computational and network science and connect us to the unique resources of the Massachusetts Open Cloud and the Hariri Institute to create a program centered on the challenges arising from the cloud and mobile computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), server farms, security, and privacy. We invite you to explore our research activities, meet our teams, and read about our success stories by visiting the faculty, lab and research center pages below.

Affiliated Faculty

Azer Bestavros, Richard Brower, Ayse Coskun, Mark Crovella, Manuel Egele, Roscoe Giles, Martin Herbordt, Ajay Joshi, Orran Krieger, Wenchao Li, Alan Liu, Thomas Little, David Starobinski, Gianluca Stringhini, Ari Trachtenberg

Affiliated Labs
Affiliated Research Centers
In the news:
  • June 8, 2022

    Hariri Highlights: ECE Professor To Lead Computing Institute, and More

    With such clear interests and goals in common, it’s no wonder that there is a strong relationship between BU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. [ More ]

  • March 4, 2022

    Building Safe and Trustworthy AI Systems

    Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, powering applications such as Spotify music suggestions, facial recognition from your smartphone or the ETA of your Uber. Neural networks are also being explored as controllers in a breadth of safety-critical systems, from piloting drones to detecting anomalies in nuclear power plants to maintaining first... [ More ]

  • February 23, 2022

    Faster, Greener, Cheaper, More Secure: Yazicigil’s GRAND Project Pushes Forward with New Funding

    Professor Rabia Yazicigil and her MIT collaborators are on a roll. The multi-institutional team behind the GRAND universal decoder algorithm and its first realization in hardware have been awarded $5M in funding by the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) to continue developing revolutionary improvements to wireless communications. [ More ]

  • February 11, 2022

    The Powers of Machine Learning in Amazon Alexa and Music Generation

    Every day millions of people look something up online. It’s become a habit, a part of our lives that we take for granted– and we can thank machine learning for that. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that works with computer algorithms. It uses data and statistics to... [ More ]

  • February 10, 2022

    College of Engineering Recognizes Stringhini for Research Excellence

    The Early Career Research Award celebrates the newest and most groundbreaking research conducted by tenure-track faculty at the College of Engineering who are within 10 years of receiving their PhD. [ More ]