Kemal Akkaya

Bio

The need of cybersecurity solutions in almost every domain brought new challenges due to their practical deployment and interaction with users or other applications. Dr. Kemal Akkaya categorizes these new challenges under engineering, management, and user aspects. Specifically, security engineering refers to design and development of secure systems by efficiently bringing different components together geared for building a specific application. For instance, depending on the application restrictions such as bandwidth, delay, costs, etc., Dr. Akkaya’s research group design new protocols for authentication, key agreement, and privacy to meet the performance requirements that may relate to above restrictions. This may involve utilizing tools from applied cryptography, machine learning, game theory or blockchains. Security management is an emerging concept which deals with the maintenance of the existing secure systems. One of the major issues under this item studied by Dr. Akkaya’s group is to manage security keys and certificates. Another issue is to update intrusion detection/prevention system machine learning models with the ever-changing attack environments. There are many other aspects which may include dealing with third parties, cloud, and internal users. User aspects of security is a very broad area and brings many critical issues into perspectives in terms of privacy, usability, and cyber crime. Privacy-enhancing technologies, namely secure multi-party computation (MPC) is explored by Dr. Akkaya’s group to be efficiently run on cloud environments. Cyber crime represents another user aspect of cybersecurity since prosecution of these crimes depend on novel digital forensics frameworks which may be using various machine/deep learning techniques.