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Dr Rahat Masood

Dr Rahat Masood

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

Dr. Rahat Masood is currently working as a Lecturer at theSchool 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 at . 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.

Herongoing 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 is currently working on funded research projects supported by theand Defence Innovation Network (DIN). 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 , New Mexico, and 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).

Phone
+61-2-9065 9916
Location
Barker St, Kensington NSW 2052
  • Book Chapters | 2022
    Masood R; Berkovsky S; Kaafar MA, 2022, 'Tracking and personalization', in Modern Socio-Technical Perspectives on Privacy, pp. 171 - 202,
    Book Chapters | 2014
    Mehak F; Masood R; Ghazi Y; Shibli MA; Khan S, 2014, 'Security Aspects of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) in Cloud Computing', in Computer Communications and Networks, Springer International Publishing, pp. 297 - 324,
    Book Chapters | 2014
    Shibli MA; Masood R; Habiba U; Kanwal A; Ghazi Y; Mumtaz R, 2014, 'Access Control As a Service in Cloud: Challenges, Impact and Strategies', in Computer Communications and Networks, Springer London, pp. 55 - 99,
  • Journal articles | 2024
    Bhaskar N; Ahmed J; Masood R; Ahmed N; Kerr S; Jha SK, 2024, 'A Comprehensive Threat Modelling Analysis for Distributed Energy Resources', ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 8, pp. 1 - 32,
    Journal articles | 2024
    Gunawardena R; Jayawardena S; Seneviratne S; Masood R; Kanhere SS, 2024, 'Single-Sensor Sparse Adversarial Perturbation Attacks Against Behavioral Biometrics', IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 11, pp. 27303 - 27321,
    Journal articles | 2023
    Sharma B; Karunanayake I; Masood R; Ikram M, 2023, 'Don't Be a Victim during a Pandemic! Analysing Security and Privacy Threats in Twitter during COVID-19', IEEE Access, 11, pp. 29769 - 29789,
    Journal articles | 2021
    Zhao J; Masood R; Seneviratne S, 2021, 'A review of computer vision methods in network security', IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 23, pp. 1838 - 1878,
    Journal articles | 2020
    Ikram M; Masood R; Tyson G; Kaafar MA; Loizon N; Ensafi R, 2020, 'Measuring and Analysing the Chain of Implicit Trust: A Study of Third-party Resources Loading', ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 23,
    Journal articles | 2018
    Elgedawy I; Khurshid S; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2018, 'CRESCENT+: a self-protecting framework for reliable composite web service delivery', Iran Journal of Computer Science, 1, pp. 65 - 87,
    Journal articles | 2018
    Masood R; Zhao BZH; Asghar HJ; Kaafar MA, 2018, 'Touch and You’re Trapp(ck)ed: Quantifying the Uniqueness of Touch Gestures for Tracking', Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2018, pp. 122 - 142,
    Journal articles | 2017
    Mehak F; Masood R; Shibli MA; Elgedway I, 2017, 'EACF: extensible access control framework for cloud environments', Annales des Telecommunications/Annals of Telecommunications, 72, pp. 307 - 323,
    Journal articles | 2016
    Ghazi Y; Masood R; Rauf A; Shibli MA; Hassan O, 2016, 'DB-SECaaS: a cloud-based protection system for document-oriented NoSQL databases', Eurasip Journal on Information Security, 2016,
    Journal articles | 2015
    Kanwal A; Masood R; Shibli MA; Mumtaz R, 2015, 'Taxonomy for trust models in cloud computing', Computer Journal, 58, pp. 601 - 626,
    Journal articles | 2015
    Masood R; Shibli MA; Ghazi Y; Kanwal A; Ali A, 2015, 'Cloud authorization: exploring techniques and approach towards effective access control framework', Frontiers of Computer Science, 9, pp. 297 - 321,
    Journal articles | 2015
    Shibli MA; Masood R; Ghazi Y; Muftic S, 2015, 'MagicNET: Mobile agents data protection system', Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 26, pp. 813 - 835,
    Journal articles | 2014
    Habiba U; Masood R; Shibli MA; Niazi MA, 2014, 'Cloud identity management security issues & solutions: a taxonomy', Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling, 2,
  • Preprints | 2024
    Akhtar MM; Bhuiyan NS; Masood R; Ikram M; Kanhere SS, 2024, BotSSCL: Social Bot Detection with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning, ,
    Conference Papers | 2024
    Akhtar MM; Masood R; Ikram M; Kanhere SS, 2024, 'SoK: False Information, Bots and Malicious Campaigns: Demystifying Elements of Social Media Manipulations', in ACM AsiaCCS 2024 - Proceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 1784 - 1800,
    Conference Papers | 2024
    Bogahawatta N; How G; Karunanayake Y; Seneviratne S; Thilakarathna K; Kahere S; Masood R; Seneviratne A, 2024, 'DEMO : Passive Identification of WiFi Devices in Real-Time', in SIGCOMM Posters and Demos 2024 - Proceedings of the 2024 SIGCOMM Poster and Demo Sessions, Part of: SIGCOMM 2024, pp. 92 - 94,
    Conference Papers | 2024
    Bogahawatta N; Karunanayaka YS; Seneviratne S; Thilakarathna K; Masood R; Kanhere S; Seneviratne A, 2024, 'Passive Identification of WiFi Devices At-Scale: A Data-Driven Approach', in 2024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), IEEE, pp. 1 - 9, presented at 2024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), 08 October 2024 - 10 October 2024,
    Conference Papers | 2024
    Masood R; Cheng WY; Vatsalan D; Mishra D; Asghar HJ; Kaafar D, 2024, 'Privacy Preserving Release of Mobile Sensor Data', in ACM International Conference Proceeding Series,
    Conference Papers | 2023
    Akhtar MM; Karunanayake I; Sharma B; Masood R; Ikram M; Kanhere SS, 2023, 'Towards Automatic Annotation and Detection of Fake News', in Proceedings - Conference on Local Computer Networks, LCN,
    Preprints | 2023
    Akhtar MM; Masood R; Ikram M; Kanhere SS, 2023, False Information, Bots and Malicious Campaigns: Demystifying Elements of Social Media Manipulations, ,
    Preprints | 2023
    Gunawardena R; Yin Y; Huang Y; Masood R; Seneviratne S; Razzak I; Tran N; Seneviratne A, 2023, Usability of Privacy Controls in Top Health Websites, ,
    Preprints | 2022
    Akhtar MM; Sharma B; Karunanayake I; Masood R; Ikram M; Kanhere SS, 2022, Machine Learning-based Automatic Annotation and Detection of COVID-19 Fake News, ,
    Preprints | 2022
    Ikram M; Masood R; Tyson G; Kaafar MA; Ensafi R, 2022, A Study of Third-party Resources Loading on Web, ,
    Preprints | 2022
    Masood R; Cheng WY; Vatsalan D; Mishra D; Asghar HJ; Kaafar MA, 2022, Privacy Preserving Release of Mobile Sensor Data, ,
    Preprints | 2022
    Sharma B; Karunanayake I; Masood R; Ikram M, 2022, Don't be a Victim During a Pandemic! Analysing Security and Privacy Threats in Twitter During COVID-19, ,
    Preprints | 2022
    xue W; Ahmed N; Masood R; Hu W; Seneviratne A; Jha SK, 2022, FLAP: Federated Learning with Attack and Privacy Awareness, ,
    Conference Papers | 2020
    Yao W; Li Y; Lin W; Hu T; Chowdhury I; Masood R; Seneviratne S, 2020, 'Security Apps under the Looking Glass: An Empirical Analysis of Android Security Apps', in Proceedings - Conference on Local Computer Networks, LCN, pp. 381 - 384,
    Preprints | 2020
    Yao W; Li Y; Lin W; Hu T; Chowdhury I; Masood R; Seneviratne S, 2020, Security Apps under the Looking Glass: An Empirical Analysis of Android Security Apps, ,
    Preprints | 2020
    Zhao J; Masood R; Seneviratne S, 2020, A Review of Computer Vision Methods in Network Security, ,
    Conference Papers | 2019
    Ikram M; Masood R; Gareth T; Noha Loizon ; Kaafar ; Ensafi R, 2019, 'The Chain of Implicit Trust: An Analysis of the Web Third-party Resources Loading', in Proceeding WWW '19 The World Wide Web Conference, ACM, San Francisco, USA, pp. 2851 - 2857, presented at WWW 2019, San Francisco, USA, 13 May 2019 - 17 May 2018,
    Preprints | 2019
    Ikram M; Masood R; Tyson G; Kaafar MA; Loizon N; Ensafi R, 2019, The Chain of Implicit Trust: An Analysis of the Web Third-party Resources Loading, ,
    Conference Papers | 2018
    Masood R; Vatsalan D; Ikram M; Kaafar D, 2018, 'Incognito: A Method for Obfuscating Web Data', in Incognito: A Method for Obfuscating Web Data, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Lyon, France, presented at WWW TheWebConf 2018, Lyon, France, 23 April 2018 - 27 April 2018,
    Conference Papers | 2017
    Masood R; Zhao BZH; Asghar HJ; Kaafar MA, 2017, 'Poster: Touchtrack: How unique are your touch gestures?', in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Dallas, Texas, USA, pp. 2555 - 2557, presented at 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Dallas, Texas, USA, 30 October 2017 - 03 November 2017,
    Conference Papers | 2016
    Mehmood Y; Shibli MA; Kanwal A; Masood R, 2016, 'Distributed intrusion detection system using mobile agents in cloud computing environment', in Proceedings - 2015 Conference on Information Assurance and Cyber Security, CIACS 2015, pp. 1 - 8,
    Conference Papers | 2015
    Habiba U; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2015, 'Secure identity management system for federated Cloud environment', in Studies in Computational Intelligence, pp. 17 - 33,
    Conference Papers | 2015
    Shibli MA; Masood R; Habiba U, 2015, 'Realization of FGAC model using XACML policy specification', in 2015 IEEE/ACIS 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing, SNPD 2015 - Proceedings,
    Conference Papers | 2014
    Kanwal A; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2014, 'Evaluation and establishment of trust in cloud federation', in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication, ICUIMC 2014,
    Conference Papers | 2014
    Masood R; Shibli MA; Ghafoor A, 2014, 'Fine-grained access control in object-oriented databases', in Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, pp. 133 - 138,
    Conference Papers | 2014
    Zahid A; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2014, 'Security of sharded NoSQL databases: A comparative analysis', in Conference Proceedings - 2014 Conference on Information Assurance and Cyber Security, CIACS 2014, pp. 1 - 8,
    Conference Papers | 2013
    Habiba U; Abassi AG; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2013, 'Assessment criteria for cloud identity management systems', in Proceedings of IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC, pp. 188 - 195,
    Conference Papers | 2013
    Kanwal A; Masood R; Ghazia UE; Shibli MA; Abbasi AG, 2013, 'Assessment criteria for trust models in cloud computing', in Proceedings - 2013 IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications and IEEE Internet of Things and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, GreenCom-iThings-CPSCom 2013, pp. 254 - 261,
    Conference Papers | 2013
    Kazim M; Masood R; Shibli MA; Abbasi AG, 2013, 'Security aspects of virtualization in cloud computing', in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 229 - 240,
    Conference Papers | 2013
    Kazim M; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2013, 'Securing the virtual machine images in Cloud computing', in SIN 2013 - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks, pp. 425 - 428,
    Conference Papers | 2013
    Mehmood Y; Shibli MA; Habiba U; Masood R, 2013, 'Intrusion detection system in cloud computing: Challenges and opportunities', in Conference Proceedings - 2013 2nd National Conference on Information Assurance, NCIA 2013, pp. 59 - 66,
    Conference Papers | 2012
    Um-E-Ghazia ; Masood R; Shibli MA; Bilal M, 2012, 'Usage control model specification in XACML policy language XACML policy engine of UCON', in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 68 - 79,
    Conference Papers | 2012
    Um-e-Ghazia ; Masood R; Shibli MA, 2012, 'Comparative analysis of access control systems on cloud', in Proceedings - 13th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing, SNPD 2012, pp. 41 - 46,
    Conference Papers | 2011
    Masood R; Ghazia UE; Anwar Z, 2011, 'SWAM: Stuxnet worm analysis in Metasploit', in Proceedings - 2011 9th International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology, FIT 2011, pp. 142 - 147,

-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).

  • 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

Rahat is currently jointly supervising two PhD Students and three honours thesis students.

1. Mohammad Majid Akhtar (PhD Student)

2. Ravin Gunawardena (PhD Student)

3. Noa Helmer (Honour Thesis Students)

4.Namit Khurrana(Honour Thesis Students)

5. Omar Wael(Honour Thesis Students)

My Teaching

Rahat's teaching interests combinethe 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