Cristina Nita-Rotaru Professor of Computer Science Khoury College of Computer Sciences Northeastern University email: c.nitarotaru@northeastern.edu address: Northeastern University - 515-177 lab: Network and Distributed Systems Security [nds2] twitter: @cnitarotaru blog: unpacked research: resilient network protocols and distributed systems, adversarial testing, formal verification, blockchains, trustworthy AI

``There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.'' Christopher Morley

Bio

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is a Professor of Computer Science in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University where she leads the Network and Distributed Systems Security Laboratory (NDS2) and is a founding member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern she was a faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University (2003 - 2015). She served as an Associate Dean of Faculty at Northeastern University (2017 - 2020) and as an Assistant Director for CERIAS at Purdue University (2011 - 2013). Her research lies at the intersection of cybersecurity, distributed systems, and computer networks. The overarching goal of her work is designing and building resilient distributed systems and network protocols that are resilient to faults, misconfigurations, and attacks. Her research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, Verisign, Toyota ITC, Visa Research, PwC, Google, UBRI, CISCO, Verizon, and Ethereum Foundation. Her work received several best paper awards in NETYS 2023, ACM SACMAT 2022, IEEE SafeThings 2019, NDSS 2018, ISSRE 2017, DSN 2015, two IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize in 2018 and 2016, and Test-of-Time award in ACM SACMAT 2022. She is a recipient of the NSF Career Award in 2006.

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is also a recipient of Purdue College of Science Research Award in 2013, Purdue Excellence in Research Award, Seeds for Success in 2012, Purdue College of Science Leadership Award, 2012, Purdue College of Science Undergraduate Advising Award in 2008, and Purdue Teaching for Tomorrow Award in 2007. Cristina Nita-Rotaru has served on the program committee of numerous conferences in networking, distributed systems and security such as ISOC NDSS, IEEE S&P, IEEE Euro S&P, IEEE/IFIP DSN, IEEE ICNP, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE INFOCOM, ACM CCS, ACM Wisec, ACM SOCC, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNEXT, ACM Web, ACM Eurosys, ASPLOS, USENIX Security, USENIX OSDI, USENIX ATC. She was an Associate Editor for Elsevier Computer Communications (2008 - 2011), IEEE Transactions on Computers (2011 - 2014), ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security (2009 - 2013), Computer Networks (2012 - 2014), IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (2011 - 2016), and IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems (2013 - 2017). She was a member of the steering committee of ISOC NDSS, ACM Wisec, and IEEE/IFIP DSN. She was a general chair for IEEE DSN 2022 and ISOC NDSS 2023, 2024, and a chair of the Steering Group of NDSS 2024. She was a chair of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award Committee (2019, 2020). She is currently a member of the IFIP Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault-tolerance and the Steering Committee of ACM SACMAT, the Vice-Chair of the IEEE Technical Community on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance (TCFT), and the co-chair of IEEE S&P 2025.

Cristina Nita-Rotaru holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a MS from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania. She was born and grew up in Bucharest, Romania. She is an alumnus of ``Colegiul National Sfantul Sava''.

Research

My research lies at the intersection of information security, distributed systems, and computer networks. The overarching goal of my work is creating and building robust distributed systems and network protocols that achieve their security, availability, and performance design goals in spite of misconfigurations, failures, and attacks. My research combines theoretical principles and experimental methodologies from distributed systems, cryptography, networking, information theory, machine learning, formal methods, and software engineering to create systems and protocols based on provable guarantees and validated in realistic network environments.

My research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ONR, Verisign, Toyota ITC, Visa Research, PwC, Google, UBRI, CISCO, Verizon, Ethereum Foundation.

For detailed information about the active projects check our lab webpage NDS2 Lab.

Students

Current students: see here.

Former graduate students and postdocs that I had the privilege to work with at Purdue University and Northeastern University: Postdocs:

• Reza Curtmola (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 2007), Professor NJIT;
• Endadul Hoque, (Ph.D. Purdue University Dec. 2015), Assistant Professor, Syracuse University.

Ph.D:
• Max von Hippel, 2024, founding partner of Bencify
• Matthew Jagielski (co-advised with Alina Oprea), 2021, Google DeepMind
• Samuel Jero, (Ph.D. Purdue University, May 2018), MIT Lincoln Labs
• Endadul Hoque, (Ph.D. Purdue University Dec. 2015)
• Hyojeong Lee (co-advised with Prof. C. Killian, Ph.D. Purdue University, Sept. 2014), Google
• Andrew Newell, (Ph.D. Purdue University, Aug. 2014), Facebook
• Rahul Potharaju (Ph.D. Purdue University, May 2014), Microsoft
• Jeffrey Seibert, (Ph. D Purdue University, May 2012), Google
• David Zage, (Ph.D. Purdue University, May 2010), Intel
• Jing Dong, (Ph.D. Purdue University, Dec. 2009), Knight Equity Markets
• Mercan Topkara (co-advised with Prof. M. Atallah, Ph.D. Purdue University, July 2007), IBM T.J. Watson
• Bogdan Carbunar (co-advised with Prof. A. Grama and Prof. J. Vitek), (Ph.D. Purdue University, May 2005), Associate Professor, Florida International University

M.S.:
• Gokberk Yar, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2023)
• Naveen Muralidhar, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2021)
• Asad Salman, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2019)
• Connor Zanin, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2019),
• Anthony Peterson, (M.S Thesis. Northeastern University, May 2019)
• Berkcan Gurel, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2019)
• Caleb Wastler, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2019)
• Supraja Krishnan, (M.S. Northeastern University, May 2018) Luojie Xiang, Apple (M.S. Purdue University, May 2014), Camille Gaspard, CISCO (M.S. Purdue University, May 2009)
• Aaron Walters, founding partner of Volatile Systems (M.S. Thesis, Purdue University May 2006)
• Chi-Bun (Ben) Chan, Xilinx Inc, (M.S. Purdue University Dec. 2004)

Teaching

Graduate:
• Applications of Formal Methods to Security of Network Protocols and Distributed Systems (CS 7670) [www]
• Distributed Systems (CS 7610), Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020. [www], Fall 2024
• Computer networks (CS 5700), Fall 2017. [www]
• Distributed systems (CS 7680), Spring 2017. [www]
• Network security (CS 6740), Spring 2016. [www]

Undergraduate:
• Distributed Systems (CS 4730) Spring 2023 [www] Fall 2023, Spring 2024.
• Foundations of Cybersecurity (CY 2550), Fall 2022. [www]

Graduate:
• Distributed Systems [www ], Advanced Distributed Systems
• Information Security and Assurance) [www ], Advanced Information Assurance
• Cryptography

Undergraduate:
• Introduction to C [www]
• Introduction to Cryptography [www]
• Computer Security

Service

Conferences I am currently involved with: EuroSys 2024, IEEE S&P 2024 (TPC Co-Chair)

Some of the conferences that I have been involved with: ISOC NDSS, IEEE S&P, IEEE Euro S&P, IEEE/IFIP DSN, IEEE ICNP, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE INFOCOM, ACM CCS, ACM Wisec, ACM SOCC, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNEXT, ACM Web, ACM Eurosys, ASPLOS, USENIX Security, USENIX OSDI, USENIX ATC

Some of the journals I was an Associate Editor for: IEEE TDSC, IEEE TMC, IEEE TC, ACM TOPS (former ACM TISSEC).

Chair of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award Committee (2019, 2020).