Nicolas Christin

Professor
School of Computer Science, Engineering & Public Policy, and Cylab
Department Head, Software and Societal Systems, School of Computer Science

Bio

• Department Head, Software and Societal Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, 2024-present
• Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 2022-present
• Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 2019-2022
  
• Associate Research Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 2016-2019
• Assistant Research Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 2013-2016
• Senior Systems Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University, 2011-2013
• Systems Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005-2011
• Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 2003-2005

Nicolas Christin is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is also the Department Head of the Software and Societal Systems Department in the School of Computer Science. He in addition holds an appointment in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and co-directs the Secure Blockchain Initiative within Carnegie Mellon CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, and was a post-doc at UC Berkeley prior to joining Carnegie Mellon in 2005. His research interests are in computer and information systems security. Most of his work is at the boundary of measurements, systems, and policy research. He has most recently focused on cryptocurrencies, security analytics, online crime modeling, and economic and human aspects of computer security. His group's research won several awards including best papers at conferences such as ACM CHI or USENIX Security, the IEEE Cybersecurity Award, the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, the test-of-time award at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, among others.

Education

Research

Selected Publications

Blase Ur, Felicia Alfieri, Maung Aung, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Jessica Colnago, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Harold Dixon, Pardis Emami Naeini, Hana Habib, Noah Johnson, and William Melicher. Design and Evaluation of a Data-Driven Password Meter. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017), pages 3775-3786. Denver, CO. May 2017.

William Melicher, Blase Ur, Sean Segreti, Saranga Komanduri, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, and Lorrie Faith Cranor. Fast, lean, and accurate: modeling password guessability using neural networks. In Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'16). Austin, TX. August 2016.

Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin. Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'15), pages 33-48. Washington, DC. August 2015.

Luís Brandão, Nicolas Christin, George Danezis, and Anonymous. Toward Mending Two Nation-Scale Brokered Identification Systems. In Proceedings of the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium (PETS 2015). Philadelphia, PA. June 2015.

Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin. Automatically Detecting Vulnerable Websites Before They Turn Malicious. In Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'14), pages 625-640. San Diego, CA. August 2014.

Michelle Mazurek, Saranga Komanduri, Timothy Vidas, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Patrick Gage Kelley, Richard Shay, and Blase Ur. Measuring Password Guessability for an Entire University. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2013). Berlin, Germany. November 2013.

Nicolas Christin. Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace. In Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'13), pages 213-224. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. May 2013.

Nektarios Leontiadis, Tyler Moore, and Nicolas Christin. Measuring and Analyzing Search-Redirection Attacks in the Illicit Online Prescription Drug Trade. In Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'11). San Francisco, CA. August 2011.

Saranga Komanduri, Richard Shay, Patrick Gage Kelley, Michelle Mazurek, Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Lorrie Cranor and Serge Egelman. Of Passwords and People: Measuring the Effect of Password-Composition Policies. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), pages 2595-2604. Vancouver, BC, Canada. May 2011.

Jens Grossklags, Nicolas Christin, and John Chuang. Secure or Insure? A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Information Security Games. In Proceedings of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'08), pages 209-218. Beijing, China. April 2008.

Nicolas Christin, Andreas S. Weigend, and John Chuang. Content Availability, Pollution and Poisoning in Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks. In Proceedings of the Sixth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'05), pages 68-77. Vancouver, BC, Canada. June 2005.