The University of Massachusetts Cybersecurity Institute is a multi-disciplinary home for security research and education at UMass. The driving mission of the Institute is to advance Security for the Common Good. Researchers and educators who are part of the Institute lead projects and courses that help society, including increasing privacy, protecting personal information, thwarting exploitation of the vulnerable, and increasing access to the Internet.  Working with partners in government, industry, and academia, the Institute seeks to advance scientific and societal understanding of pressing issues in the field.

Faculty and students who are part of the Institute work in research areas spanning security, privacy, and forensics challenges in networking and communications, embedded systems, software engineering, software systems, applied cryptography, policy, cryptocurrency, and more. Across many colleges, we offer a world-class curriculum in security as part of certificates and BA, BS, MS, and PhD degrees.


 

 

Recent News

Raja Hasnain Anwar
August 20, 2026
Doctoral student Raja Hasnain Anwar and Assistant Professor Taqi Raza showed that some expired credit cards can still be used for tap-to-pay purchases, a finding presented at USENIX Security 2026. Using two ordinary smartphones, they rewrote the... more
Ali Zohaib and Amir Houmansadr
July 14, 2026
Doctoral student Ali Zohaib and Professor Amir Houmansadr received the 2026 Best Practical Paper Award from the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) community for “Exposing and Circumventing SNI-based QUIC Censorship.” With... more
Eugene Bagdasarian
July 13, 2026
Contextual Agent Security, a design by Assistant Professor Eugene Bagdasarian with collaborator Lillian Tsai, is now used as a semantic policy engine in Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The approach checks an AI agent's proposed tool... more
Pubali Datta
May 18, 2026
UMass student Katherine Zhang and Assistant Professor Pubali Datta presented “International Students and Scams: At Risk Abroad” at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, with collaborators at Florida International University and Purdue.... more
Marc Liberatore
May 08, 2026
Senior Teaching Faculty Marc Liberatore received a 2025–2026 UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award, one of the university's highest honors for teaching. He is one of five faculty honorees this year and the fourth CICS faculty member to win the... more