Aaron Blankstein
PhD StudentS* Network Systems Group.
ablankst (at) cs . princeton edu
I'm Aaron, a PhD student at Princeton University working with Mike Freedman. I am interested in security, distributed systems, and information privacy.
Previously, I attended MIT and received a pair of bachelor's degrees. I received my M.Eng in 2011 advised by Barbara Liskov while working in the Programming Methodology Group on Distributed Information Flow Control and Secure Audit Trail Analysis. My thesis was titled Analyzing Audit Trails in the Aeolus Security Platform.
Current Research
I am currently exploring alternative programming models and mechanisms for securing application data. Many modern applications rely on a centralized and logically separate shared data store. By ensuring that only "normal" queries can execute on this data store, certain confidentiality and integrity guarantees can be provided for application data even while the application itself is compromised by attackers. This model allows application programmers to use already familiar interfaces without any explicit security specifications.Publications
- Social Networking with Frientegrity: Privacy and Integrity with an Untrusted Provider. Ariel J. Feldman, Aaron Blankstein, Michael J. Freedman, and Edward W. Felten Proc. USENIX Security (Sec '12), Bellevue, WA, August 2012.
- Abstractions for Usable Information Flow Control in Aeolus. Winnie Cheng, Dan R. K. Ports, David Schultz, James Cowling, Victoria Popic, Aaron Blankstein, Dorothy Curtis, Liuba Shrira, and Barbara Liskov. In Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '12), Boston, MA, June 2012.
- Analyzing Audit Trails in the Aeolus Security Platform. Aaron Blankstein. Masters thesis, MIT, (Cambridge, MA, USA), June 2011.