Dr Rahat Masood | UNSW Research

Keywords

critical infrastructure security

cyber security

social media analysis

Fields of Research (FoR)

Cybersecurity and privacy, Data and information privacy, Privacy and data rights, Cybercrime, Data security and protection, Software and application security

Biography

Dr. Rahat Masood is currently working as a Lecturer at the School of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), UNSW. Her research focuses on the rapidly expanding and high-impact field of Cybersecurity, with more particular interest in privacy preserving technologies, authentication & authorization, critical infrastructure security, and network security measurement and analysis. More recently, her research has involved designing and developing privacy risks identification and quantification, and privacy-preserving technologies, particularly from human behaviour perspective. She received her PhD from the UNSW, in collaboration with the information security and privacy group at Data61-CSIRO. Before joining UNSW, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Data61-CSIRO, where she designed and evaluated privacy-preserving algorithms as required by diverse application scenarios.

Her ongoing collaborations with esteemed research groups, mainly including Queen Mary University, University of Michigan, Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub, Data61-CSIRO, and University of Sydney, have resulted in several publications in top-tier conferences and journals such as WWW (Core A*), ASIA CCS(Core A), TOPS (Core A), PETS (Core A), IEEE Communication Surveys, and IEEE Internet of Journal. She has worked on funded research projects supported by the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) and Defence Innovation Network (DIN), National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants (NISDRG). Furthermore, she is involved in multiple industry projects with the Australian Domain Administration (Auda), NSW Treasury, and the NSW Connectivity Innovation Network. She was also a visiting scholar at the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), New Mexico, and Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) at The George Washington University. Her Master's degree is in Computer & Communication Security from NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), Pakistan, and Bachelor's degree is in Software Engineering (Honours).

My Grants

-Received Early Career Start-up Package grant from UNSW CSE, $104,027 (2020)

Received Taste of Research (ToR) Scholarships from Faculty of Engineering, $18,000 (2021- 2022)

Received Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) combined grant on the project titled “Cyber security Analysis with Massive Distributed Energy Resources (DErs) Integration: Potential Threats and Countermeasures”, $1,065,000 (2021)

Received Southern-Cross Fellowship from Australian Computing Research Alliance (ACRA) – 2022

Received Defence Innovation Network (DIN) grant on the project titled “IoT Network Forensics using Encrypted Traffic Analysis (ETA)”, $200,000 (2022).

Received NSW Treasury grant to work on “Threat Modeling and Risk Assessment of Consumer Data Rights in Australia”, $100,000 (2023).

Received Australian Domain Administration (auDA) grant to work on “DNS Abuse cases in Australia”, $50,000 (2023-2024).

Received NSW Connectivity Innovation Network (CIN) PhD Scholarship, $137,000 (2024-2027).

Received National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grant (NISDRG) grant to work on "multimodal biometrics", $799,000 (2025-2028).

My Qualifications

PhD. in Information Security and Privacy (UNSW, Data61-CSIRO - Australia)
MS in Computer and Communication Security (NUST - Pakistan)
B.Sc. in Software Engineering (University of Engineering & Technology - Pakistan)

My Awards

Recipient of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) – Data61 Writing Fellowship, 2019
Recipient of Student Travel Grant from the conference ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2017
Recipient of Grant from Postgraduate Research Support Scheme (PRSS) from Graduate Research School (GRS), UNSW, 2017
Awarded NICTA Research Project Award (NRPA) from National ICT Australia (NICTA – now Data61), for the years 2016 – 2019
Awarded International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) from Australian government, for the years 2016 – 2019
Recipient of Nonproliferation Studies Scholarship from CRDF Global, with a grant from the U. S. State Department
Merit Certificate for “Excellent performance in Bachelor of Computer Software Engineering”
“Gold Medal” for obtaining first position in Undergraduate Degree
Recipient of merit scholarship throughout eight semesters during Undergraduate Degree
Contributed in the ICT R&D Proposal submission for successful funded research project, project value PKR 13.0 Million
Published research articles in well-reputed conferences, journals and books

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

biometric security

computer security

critical infrastructure security

social media analysis

Areas of supervision

Rahat's research interests involve the area of information security and privacy. She is very interested in identifying, measuring, and analyzing the user-behavioural based privacy leakages. Her research interest involves understanding the relationship between human and privacy. It includes aspects such as psychology, feedback, reactions, privacy settings etc. She is also interested in the area of IoT privacy and security with the main focus on secure information sharing between devices and third-parties.

Usable Privacy
Malicious Online Campaign Detection
Time-Series Attacks Detection and Solutions
Mobile and IoT Devices Security
Privacy Preserving Technologies
Social Media Analysis

Currently supervising

Rahat is currently jointly supervising four PhD Students.

1. Mohammad Majid Akhtar (PhD Student)

2. Ravin Gunawardena (PhD Student)

3. Khoa Tran (PhD Student)

4. Ransika Hewa Kasakarage Gunasekara (PhD Student)

My Teaching

Rahat's teaching interests combine the areas of cybersecurity and software engineering. More particularly, she is interested in teaching courses related to privacy, information security, network security, web and application security, and software engineering. She is experienced teaching following courses:

Foundations of Cybersecurity

Principles of Security Engineering

Digital Forensics

Information Security Management

Network Security

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