Researcher

Dr Rahat Masood

Keywords

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 an Associate Lecturer at the School of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), UNSW. Her research area focuses on the security and privacy of mobile, web, and IoT platforms, network security, and critical infrastructure protection.  More recently, her research has involved privacy risks identification and quantification, and privacy-preserving technologies, particularly from human behaviour perspective....view more

Dr. Rahat Masood is currently working as an Associate Lecturer at the School of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), UNSW. Her research area focuses on the security and privacy of mobile, web, and IoT platforms, network security, and critical infrastructure protection.  More recently, her research has involved 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.

Rahat is currently associated with Data61-CSIRO as a visiting scholar and also collaborating with Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) on multiple cyber security projects. 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

User-Oriented Privacy for Mobile and Web Platforms, CSE School Funding for Early Career Researchers, 2020.


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

  • 2019, Recipient of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) – Data61 Writing Fellowship
  • 2017, Recipient of Student Travel Grant from the conference ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
  • 2016-2019, Awarded NICTA Research Project Award (NRPA) from National ICT Australia (NICTA – now Data61)
  • 2016-2019, Awarded International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) from the Australian government
  • 2015, Recipient of Nonproliferation Studies Scholarship from CRDF Global, with a grant from the U. S. State Department
  • 2010, Recipient of Merit Certificate for “Excellent performance in Bachelor of Computer Software Engineering”
  • 2010, Received “Gold Medal” for obtaining first position in Undergraduate Degree
  • 2006-2010, Recipient of merit scholarship throughout eight semesters during Undergraduate Degree

My Research Activities

Rahat is currently involved in multiple research projects with internal and external collaborators. She is currently supervising Taste of Research (ToR) summer student on the project titled "Impact of Social Media Networks on COVID-19 Expansion and Containment". This project is a joint collaboration with Macquarie University to understand the pandemic situation through the lens of social media platforms (e.g. Twiiter). In addition, the project involves misinformation/rumors analysis related to COVID-19 along with  indepth analysis of privacy and security leakages.

Rahat is also collaborating with Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCSRC) on multiple grant proposals and projects. She is also working as a Visiting Scientist at Information Security and Privacy (ISP) Group at Data61-CSIRO and is co-supervising a summer student.


My Research Supervision


Supervision keywords


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. This area is also known as user-oriented privacy where user's gestures or patterns are unique enough to uniquely identify him from other users. In addition, her research interest involves understanding the relationship between human and privacy. By human, we mean various 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. 


Currently supervising

Rahat is currently supervising two summer scholarship students:

1. Haesun Shim - Taste of Research (ToR) scholarship student on the project "Impact of Social Media Networks on COVID-19 Containment and Expansion".

2. Ming Lo - Data61 Summer Scholar student on the project "user Touch Gesture-based Mobile Bot Detection for Crowd-Sourcing Applications".


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. 

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Location

Barker St, Kensington NSW 2052

Map reference
Map reference (Google map)

Contact

+61-2-9065 9916