The Group

Our group is led by Professor Shweta Shinde.  Before joining ETH Zurich, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley for one and a half years. Before that, she was a PhD student at the National University of Singapore where she was supported by the President’s Graduate Fellowship.

We work broadly in computer security and privacy. Our research is at the intersection of trusted computing, system security, program analysis and formal verification. Specifically, our goals are to lay down the foundations for building large-scale secure systems with long-term impact. A lot of our work furthers this goal by showcasing the practical feasibility of securing existing and emerging software systems.

One of the challenges in security is the ever-growing size and complexity of software systems that are rife with vulnerabilities. Patches and defences are continuously deployed, but the software attack surface is extremely large, and attackers invariably find ways to gain a persistent foothold. Such attacks not only cost billions of dollars in losses but are also life-threatening. Hence it is crucial to find effective ways to end the arms race between potential attacks and corresponding defence tools.

Several deployed as well as upcoming systems such as cloud computing, machine-learning infrastructure, databases, computer networks, and embedded devices such as Internet of Things stand to benefit from fundamental ways of building secure systems from the ground up. We have started seeing wide adoption of secure techniques (e.g. trusted computing, formal verification) in cloud-based confidential computing as well as privacy-preserving analytics. I look forward to continued technology transfer from the prototypes we build in our research lab to fully deployed solutions in real-world use cases.