Gabriel Salles-Loustau, a Ph.D. student in the 4N6 Research Group of Prof. Saman Zonouz in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University, received a $10K award from the Google Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP). During his collaborative Ph.D. research between 4N6 and AT&T Research Labs (Dr. Kaustubh Joshi), Gabriel detected a serious security vulnerability in Google's Android ecosystem that would allow malicious parties without any initial access to perform unauthorized code injection/execution (remote permanent device exploitation) on smartphones and tablets running the current and several past versions of Android. Following his discovery, Gabriel developed a re-playable exploit scenario and reported it to Google Android security team.

Google has put Gabriel’s name along with his affiliated lab and Rutgers Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) on the Google Application Security Hall of Fame (https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/hall-of-fame/reward/).

Gabriel’s Ph.D. research focus is on Security and Privacy with emphasis on Smartphone and Embedded Systems Security for end-user privacy. His recent work, so-called Swirls, as part of his AT&T Research summer internship, is on privacy-preserving smartphone security solutions and facilitates Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies, Enterprise Multi-Level Security (MLS) administration, and geographic/temporal policy enforcement. Swirls is about 30K lines of code and is currently fully functional on Android-enabled handheld platforms.

Prof. Marco Gruteser has been elevated to ACM Distinguished Scientist. This is a very competitive process with only 49 ACM members selected this year in recognition of their singular impact to the field of computing.

The ACM press release is available at:

http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2014/distinguished-2014

Prof. Wade Trappe was elected Vice Chair of the IEEE  Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee. The one-year term of Vice Chair will start on 2015/1/1. The Vice Chair position automatically succeeds to the position of Chair (2016-2017) then Past Chair.

This is a very visible position in the IEEE Signal Processing Society, in an area that has been attracting increasing interest. Dr. Trappe's election is testament of the recognition that he enjoys by the technical community in that field.

CE Alumna Aylin Yener has been elevated to IEEE Fellow for contributions to wireless communications and wireless information security. Dr. Yener is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Yener is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications for her paper "Optimum Transmission Policies for Battery Limited Energy Harvesting Nodes".

Dr. Janne Lindqvist speaks at WHYY’s Newsworks on his group's Android app that clearly reveals when other apps are tracking your location.

Click here to read the article and listen to the interview:
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/blogs/onward

Dr. Lindqvist's work aims to enable smartphone users to make better decisions about their privacy and apps they use.

ECE Graduate Student Rajesh Kappera (pictured lower left) was awarded the Graduate Student Gold award at the MRS 2014 meeting.

This was highly competitive and out of 251 top applicants from all over the world, 26 finalists were selected. After technical presentations and QA sessions, 7 students were chosen as gold award recipients.

Abstract of paper presented by Rajesh Kappera at the Material Research Society 2014 meeting:   High Performance Transistors from Ultra-Thin MoS by Phase Engineered Low Resistance Contacts