Security and privacy
Amir is interested in building secure and privacy-preserving tools for Internet communications. Such tools can be deployed not only by dissidents and whistleblowers, but also by ordinary Internet users on a daily basis. More specifically, Amir's research assesses the security and privacy provided by existing network protocols and services, and proposes design adjustments or clean-slate architectures to retain users' security and privacy. To this end, Amir combines the development of practical systems with rigorous theoretical analysis, and incorporates techniques from various disciplines such as computer networking, cryptography, and statistical analysis. The specific problems Amir has explored in the past include Internet censorship resistance, network traffic analysis, network situational awareness, social network malware, mobile security, and multimedia information hiding. Amir's research has found flaws in popular privacy-preserving tools, and has led to the advent of novel designs to overcome these problems.
Amir Houmansadr is an Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2012. Amir was with the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral scholar for two years before joining UMass in 2014. Amir has earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Electrical Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology.
Amir's work has been publicized in the media through interviews, and he has received several awards for his research, including UIUC's Computer Engineering Fellowship award and the Best Practical Paper award of the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland) 2013. Amir has served as a program chair, technical program committee member, and reviewer for various conferences, workshops, and journals in the area of security and privacy.