Lab of Security Engineering (LSE)

We develop and study computer and Internet security techniques, primarily focusing on the following areas:

• Usable security: making computer security not just secure, but also practically usable.
• Systems security
• Novel data structure and algorithm: in particular those that are relevant to computer security problems.

Recognition

• Finalist, the Times Higher Education award for the Outstanding Engineering Research Team of the Year, 2009.
• Runner-up of the Evening Chronicle's Young Achiever Award (Technology Achievement) 2009 for PhD student Ahmad El Ahmad.

Faculty

• Dr Jeff Yan, principal investigator

PhD Students

• Suliman Alsuhibany
• Ahmad El Ahmad
• Paul Dunphy
• Su-Yang Yu
• Nur Haryani Zakaria

Research projects

• CAPTCHAs
• Graphical passwords (Background Draw a Secret is one of our many ongoing projects in this area)
• Design and analysis of usable security mechanisms
• Spam detection
• Phishing defense
• Online game security
• etc

Selected publications

• J. Yan, A. Blackwell, R. Anderson and A. Grant. The memorability and security of passwords -- some empirical results. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory Technical Report No. 500, 2000. Journal version appears in IEEE Security & Privacy, Vol. 2 No. 5, 2004. Reprinted with extensions in the O'Reilly book "Security and Usability" in 2005.
• J. Yan, S. Early and R. Anderson. The XenoService - A Distributed Defeat for Distributed Denial of Service. In Proceedings of the 3rd Information Survivability Workshop (ISW 2000), Boston, USA, October 2000. Also available from CERT.
• J. Yan and Y. Wu. An Attack on A Traitor Tracing Scheme. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory Technical Report No. 518, 2001. Also appears as Cryptology ePrint Archive Report 2001/067.
• J. Yan. Security Design in Online Games. In Proc. of the 19th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'03), IEEE Computer Society, Las Vegas, U.S.A., December, 2003.
• J. Yan and Brian Randell. A Systematic Classification of Cheating in Online Games. 4th Workshop on Network & System Support for Games (NetGames'05), IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, U.S.A., Oct 10-11, 2005. ACM Press.
• J Yan and PL Cho. Enhancing collaborative spam detection with Bloom filters, ACSAC'06.
• P Dunphy and J Yan. Do background images improve "draw a secret" graphical passwords? 14th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Alexandria, Virginia, USA, Oct 2007.
• J Yan and Ahmad El Ahmad. Breaking Visual CAPTCHAs with Naive Pattern Recognition Algorithms , ACSAC'07.
• J Yan and Ahmad El Ahmad. "A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA", Techincal Report, School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, 2008. A peer-reviewed version appears at ACM CCS'08 and shows that our attack is of generic value (applicable to Microsoft, Google and Yahoo CAPTCHAs).
• CAPTCHA security: a case study (with A El Ahmad), IEEE Security & Privacy, vol. 7, no. 4, July/Aug. 2009. pp. 22-28. (cover feature article)
• J Yan and Su-Yang Yu. "Streamlining Attacks on CAPTCHAs with a Computer Game". Proc. of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), Pasadena, California, USA, July 11-17, 2009. pp. 2095-2100.
• J Yan. "Collusion Detection in Online Bridge". AAAI-10.
• "Attacks and Design of Image Recognition CAPTCHAs" (with Bin Zhu et al), CCS'10.

Acknowledgements

Contact

Email:  Jeff.Yan at ncl.ac.uk 

Phone:  +44 191 222 8010
Fax:    +44 191 222 8232