Dr Rahat Masood
- 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)
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 is currently working on funded research projects supported by the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) and 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 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).
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
-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 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