Sadia Afroz, PhD, an alumna of Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) and former student of CCI Associate Professor
Rachel Greenstadt, PhD, was selected as runner up for the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC)
Doctoral Dissertation Award 2014.This annual award recognizes an outstanding doctoral thesis in computer and information security by doctoral candidates.
Afroz' thesis, titled "
Deception in Authorship Attribution," is the first to explore the effect of adversarial attacks on stylometric methods, and the first to demonstrate empirically how stylometric methods fail in adversarial settings while succeeding in non-adversarial settings. This pioneering work demonstrates the multidisciplinary requirements for online privacy and anonymity while also offering contributing to digital forensics and the study of cyber crime. Afroz finished her doctoral degree at Drexel in December 2013 and is currently a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley.
Previously Afroz and Greenstadt's work received the
2013 Privacy Enhancing Technology Award and best student paper award at the
2012 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. Their work has been featured in several news outlets and blogs including:
slashdot,
Der Spiegel,
Boing Boing and
The New York Times’ Bits blog.
The ACM SIGSAC’s mission is to develop the information security profession by sponsoring high-quality research conferences and workshops. SIGSAC conferences address all aspects of information and system security, encompassing security technologies, secure systems, security applications, and security policies. For more information, please visit
www.sigsac.org.
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