Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics

Cyber Security Laboratory

The Cyber Security Laboratory aims to advance leading cybersecurity knowledge and discovery across a variety of domains. Current and past projects have explored attack-resilient automated control of unmanned aerial vehicles, privacy protection in social networks, software plagiarism detection, classification and attribution of malware analysis, security issues related to Internet of Things devices, computer-aided human centric cyber situation awareness, and proactive worm containment, among many others.

Software Systems Security Laboratory

The Software Systems Security Laboratory explores the broad area of software systems, including software security, protection, analysis, verification, software and information assurance, programming languages, and software engineering. Our research improves the practice of software design and implementation by creating high assurance secure computing and information platforms and systems, improving software and systems security, developing innovative software analysis and verification technologies, and promoting rigorous and secure software engineering practice.

Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AAI Lab) conducts foundational and applied research on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science. Our projects explore the applications of AI in cyber-physical systems with a focus on smart and connected communities and critical infrastructure (e.g., transportation and energy) and in cybersecurity.

Center for Cyber-Security, Information Privacy, and Trust

The Center for Cyber-Security, Information Privacy, and Trust—also known as the LIONS Center—conducts interdisciplinary research in cybersecurity and privacy. We pursue projects that detect and remove threats of information misuse to the human society, mitigate risk, reduce uncertainty, and enhance predictability and trust. Our goal is to play a leading role in helping Penn State pursue security and risk research and development opportunities for the Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency, and Department of Defense.

HAX Lab

The primary mission of HAX Lab is to build and enhance online learning environments by contributing to the hax.psu.edu web service. This open-source community provides free services to anyone at the University. We welcome contributors from all backgrounds and interests and are committed to developing a sustainable ecosystem of advanced web-building solutions that are ultimately costs-less, portable, and easy for faculty, students, staff, and developers to dream with. Our community's work includes programming (full stack), UI/UX design, Data Sciences/AI, learning design, education technology development, and more.

AI for Cyber Security through Big Data

Harvesting big data related to cyber security using AI requires the identification of (1) use-inspired problems that can be addressed using AI, and (2) cyber security challenges that require the advancement of fundamental topics in AI. This research lab aims to achieve both goals by leveraging related real-world big data.