Undergraduate research at scale
Breakerspace is a research lab at the University of Maryland that gives students experience working on group research projects in the area of computer and network security.
Breakerspace is located on the 3rd floor of CSIC next to the sky bridge (the old Sandbox lab). Come by, check it out, and if you're interested in getting involved, read more below.
Breakerspace is looking for students
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Breakerspace is always looking for more students. We have many projects centered around network security and systems security, such as combatting nation-state censorship, securing the web, and more. If you're interested in learning more and getting involved, then |
Breakerspace receives paper awards
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Our paper on weaponizing middleboxes to perform reflected TCP amplification attacks received a Distinguished Paper Award from USENIX Security 2021 and an Internet Defense Prize! Congratulations to lead author Kevin Bock and Breakerspace undergraduate (at the time) coauthors Yair Fax and Kyle Hurley, as well as our collaborators at CU Boulder! You can read more about this work at censorship.ai |
Latest News
| 11/09/2022 |
Our paper on "Hammurabi: A Framework for Pluggable, Logic-based X.509 Certificate Validation Policies" received a Best Paper Honorable Mention from ACM CCS 2022! Congrats to my coauthors, including the five Breakerspace undergraduate researchers! |
| 08/10/2022 |
Rising junior Frederick Sell presented our paper "GET /out: Automated Discovery of Application-Layer Censorship Evasion Strategies" at USENIX Security 2022. See the talk video here. |
| 10/05/2021 |
Our paper on "Weaponizing Middleboxes for Reflected TCP Amplification" received an Internet Defense Prize! Thank you to USENIX and Facebook for this award. |
| 08/11/2021 |
Our paper on "Weaponizing Middleboxes for Reflected TCP Amplification" was recognized with a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2021! Congrats to Breakerspace students Kevin Bock, Yair Fax, and Kyle Hurley! |
| Past news |
Why?
Computer Science is not only the largest major on UMD's campus; it's one of the largest CS majors in the country. Research advising tends to look more like an apprenticeship than a traditional class, which makes it difficult to scale. The hope is that, through group projects, we can not only make research in UMD CS scale, but also foster a vibrant undergraduate CS research community.
What research?
Breakerspace will focus on research in computer and network security. Projects will span a wide variety of topics, including: measuring and securing the Internet of Things (IoT), resisting online censorship, analyzing and detecting malware, and more.
More information will come, but to get a flavor of the kinds of work we'll be doing, see Dave's research.