Undergrads around the nation partake in CyLab research
Daniel Tkacik
Aug 20, 2021
Each year, dozens of undergraduate students enrolled at CMU and other colleges and universities around the nation participate in CMU's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), a program funded by the National Science Foundation to give undergraduate students real-life experience in scientific research.
This year, several CyLab faculty took students in this year’s REU class under their wings to pursue research pertaining to security and privacy.
“The REU program was a really eye-opening experience for me,” said Rafaello Sanna, an REU student mentored by CyLab’s Rohan Padhye on a project focusing on fuzz testing, a common bug-finding technique. “I had done some previous research work at my home university, but this gave insights into how research is done by Ph.D. students. Everyone here was incredibly friendly and welcoming, which allowed for a great time as well as a great learning opportunity.”
The REU program was a really eye-opening experience for me.
Rafaello Sanna, undergraduate student, University of Rochester
Sanna is a rising third-year undergraduate at the University of Rochester where he’s pursuing a degree in computer science. He said one of the big things he learned from his REU experience was how interdisciplinary research is—especially security research.
“I had interactions with tooling, programming languages, and low-level Java virtual machine internals, just to name a few,” Sanna said. “To ensure system security, all parts have to work together.”
Ellie Young, another REU student, is in her final undergraduate year at the New College of Florida. She spent her summer researching “dark patterns,” or manipulative tactics, that websites use to trick users into consenting to cookie tracking.
“I had an outstanding experience,” Young said. “I like working in CyLab because I find the problems to be very directly applicable to real problems humans are currently facing. It's satisfying when every guest and bystander at the final summer poster session can instantly understand and relate to the problems we’re solving.”
I had an outstanding experience.
Ellie Young, undergraduate student, New College of Florida
Roughly a dozen undergraduate students from as many colleges and universities around the country pursued security and/or privacy-focused research projects in this year’s REU program at CMU. Those research projects and their authors are listed below.
μ2: Breaking Programs for Better Fuzzing
- Rafaello Sanna, University of Rochester
- Rohan Padhye, CMU
- Leo Li, CMU
- Bella Layborne, CMU
A Reconciliation-Based Approach to Feature Conflict Resolution
- Emma Shedden, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
- Simon Chu, CMU
- Eunsuk Kang, CMU
A Verified Standard Library
- Sarah Cai, University of California-Los Angeles
- Mimi Winchell, Los Angeles Valley College
- Yi Zhou, CMU
- Sydney Gibson, CMU
- Bryan Parno, CMU
Benchmarking Platform for Differentially Private Algorithms
- Allen Marquez, California State University-Los Angeles
- Zhiwei Steven Wu, CMU
- Terrance Liu, CMU
Dark Patterns in Cookie Consent
- Megan Li, Harvey Mudd College
- Ellie Young, New College of Florida
- Hana Habib, CMU
- Lorrie Cranor, CMU
Measuring the effect of security enforcement on functional performance of a ROS 2 TurtleBot
- Paul Smith, St. Mary’s University
- Simon Chu, CMU
- Changlian Zhang, CMU
- Eunsuk Kang, CMU
- Christian Kastner, CMU
- Bradley Schmerl, CMU
picoCTF: An Educational Platform with the Largest High School Hacking Competition
- Jenna Bustami, University of California-Berkeley
- Rachel Nguyen, Williams College
- Xinyue Lai, CMU