William Robertson
Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary with College of Engineering
Research interests
- Systems security
- Web security
- Mobile security
Education
- PhD in computer science, University of California, Santa Barbara
- BS in computer science, University of California, Santa Barbara
Biography
William Robertson is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, based in Boston. He co-directs the Northeastern Systems Security Lab and is principal investigator for the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute's Diverge Lab.
Robertson’s research revolves around improving the security of operating systems, mobile devices, and the web, as well as making use of techniques such as security by design, program analysis, and anomaly detection. Prior to joining Northeastern in 2011, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley.
Robertson was involved in the California Top-to-Bottom-Review and the Ohio EVEREST project as a red team member. In this capacity, he demonstrated that electronic voting systems were susceptible to large-scale attacks that could exploit vulnerabilities in both the firmware and the physical security of the components. His work led to significant changes in electronic voting policy in both states.
Robertson has extensive experience organizing and participating in capture the flag exercises. With Shellphish, a team composed of UC Santa Barbara-affiliated members, he won the 2005 edition of the DEFCON CTF competition. He was also instrumental in helping to organize the UCSB iCTF, the largest distributed CTF competition.
Robertson chaired or co-chaired the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference for 2015–2016, the 2013 USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies, and the 2012 Conference on the Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment. He has participated on the program committees of a number of top-tier systems security venues, including IEEE Security and Privacy, USENIX Security, NDSS, ACSAC, and RAID. He has also authored more than 30 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers on systems and network security.
Recent publications
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BabelCrypt: The Universal Encryption Layer for Mobile Messaging Applications
Citation: Ozcan, Ahmet Talha, et al. "BabelCrypt: The Universal Encryption Layer for Mobile Messaging Applications." Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2015. 355-369.| -
Game of Registrars: An Empirical Analysis of Post-Expiration Domain Name Takeovers
Citation: Tobias Lauinger, Abdelberi Chaabane, Ahmet Salih Buyukkayhan, Kaan Onarlioglu, William Robertson. Game of Registrars: An Empirical Analysis of Post-Expiration Domain Name Takeovers. USENIX Security Symposium. August 2017. -
Lens on the endpoint: Hunting for malicious software through endpoint data analysis
Citation: Ahmet Salih Buyukkayhan, Alina Oprea, Zhou Li, William Robertson. Lens on the endpoint: Hunting for malicious software through endpoint data analysis. International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID). September 2017.
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Current PhD Students
Previous PhD Students
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Sajjad Arshad
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Joshua Bundt
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Mohammad Amin Kharraz