7/21/2016 Colin Robertson, CS @ ILLINOIS
Written by Colin Robertson, CS @ ILLINOIS
CS PhD student Muhammad Naveed has been named the winner of the 2016 Ross J. Martin Award by the College of Engineering. Given to only one graduate student across the College each year, the award recognizes outstanding research achievement.
Naveed, who is advised by Professors Carl A. Gunter and Manoj Prabhakaran, brings tools and ideas from theoretical cryptography to bear on practical problems in cyber-security and information privacy. His research explores fundamental security flaws in popular systems, while developing practical—yet provably secure—cryptographic systems for real applications.
He has created systems for the secure outsourcing of genomic data and developed searchable encryption systems to work on real cloud storage services. Naveed has also studied security flaws present in popular property-preserving encrypted database systems such as CryptDB, Google Encrypted BigQuery, and Microsoft SQL Server, with results covered by popular media like Forbes, Ars Technica, and The Register. He has helped several companies—including Google, Facebook, and Amazon—secure their products and services. With colleagues from Indiana University, he identified flaws in the Android device driver customization process and helped Samsung address the issue; as a result, over 50 million newer phones do not have those flaws.
Naveed is a previous recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship in Security, the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Fellowship, the C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and a best paper at CSAW 2014. He will join the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in July.
Naveed joins Professors Luis Ceze (PhD CS ’07) and Jason Cong (MS CS ’87, PhD ’90) as the only winners of the Ross J. Martin Award from CS @ ILLINOIS.
About the Ross J. Martin Award
This award was established in honor of Ross J. Martin, a former associate dean of the College of Engineering and director of the Engineering Experiment Station for 26 years. Dean Martin realized how essential research is to a sound graduate engineering and science education and was instrumental in making the College one of the foremost research institutions in the world. In fact, the engineering research budget grew eight-fold during his tenure. The award is given to a graduate student in the College of Engineering in recognition of outstanding research achievement.