Security

"The nation's security and economy rely on infrastructures for communication, finance, energy distribution and transportation - all increasingly dependent on networked information systems. When these networked information systems perform badly or do not work at all, they put life, liberty and property at risk." —National Research Council, Trust in Cyberspace (F.B. Schneider, editor)

Cornell has one of the largest and most visible groups of security researchers found anywhere, tackling the fundamental problems of security and privacy in modern computing systems. Cornell has been a leader in computer security for decades, making widely recognized contributions that range from theoretical foundations to practical implementations to influence on government policy.

Cornell researchers are exploring the full space of security and privacy topics and working at at every level of the computing stack, with research on operating system and distributed system security, cryptography, language-based security, hardware-based security, network security, and security and privacy policies. We have a strong presence both in research that develops new methods for building secure computing systems and in research that identifies new kinds of security and privacy vulnerabilities. Security is a cross-cutting concern, and our work draws on the synergy with groups working on programming languages, operating systems, and logic and formal methods.