Carnegie Mellon University

Bryan Parno

Bryan Parno

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

  • 2121 Collaborative Innovation Center
  • 412-2-68-2033
Address 5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Bio

Bryan Parno is a Professor with a joint appointment in Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department and Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, and a Senior Member of ACM and IEEE. After receiving a Bachelor's degree from Harvard College, he completed his PhD working with Adrian Perrig at Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation won the 2010 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He then spent six years as a Researcher in Microsoft Research before returning to CMU.

Research

Bryan's research is primarily focused on investigating long-term, fundamental improvements in how to design and build secure systems. In 2011, he was selected for Forbes' 30-Under-30 Science List. He formalized and worked to optimize verifiable computation, receiving a Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy his advances. He coauthored a book on Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers, and his work in that area has been incorporated into the latest security enhancements in Intel CPUs. His research into security for new application models was incorporated into Windows and received Best Paper Awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. He has recently extended his interest in bootstrapping trust to the problem of building practical, formally verified secure systems. His other research interests include user authentication, secure network protocols, and security in constrained environments (e.g., RFID tags, sensor networks, or vehicles).

Keywords

  • Secure systems
  • End-to-end guarantees
  • Formal software verification
  • Applied Cryptography
  • Data privacy
  • Usable security

Related news

Monday, March 13, 2023

Improving System Verification

Parno and researchers present a hybrid approach that combines linear types with SMT-based verification for memory reasoning, winning an ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at this year’s OOPSLA Conference.
Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Bugless Code

Parno and a team of researchers recently published a new coding language and tool for high-performance concurrent programs that ensures that programs are provably-correct – that is, that the code is mathematically proven to compute correctly.
Friday, May 03, 2019

Parno collaborates on cryptographic provider and library

Team Everest, a joint Microsoft-academia collaboration, recently released a cryptographic provider called EverCrypt. ECE’s Bryan Parno, worked on the project,
Friday, March 29, 2019

Parno quoted in PopSci on end-to-end encryption

One proponent of encryption is ECE’s Bryan Parno, who emphasizes that it is essentially impossible to break.
Monday, March 04, 2019

Building a verifiably-secure internet

Parno and his Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. student Aymeric Fromherz, in collaboration with researchers from Microsoft, have developed a programming tool called "Vale" that can mathematically verify the security of low-level assembly code, such as cryptographic code that runs when one browses the internet.
Monday, September 24, 2018

Providing secure and resilient naval software

CMU Team Receives $7.5M Office of Naval Research Grant in Collaboration with Penn and Stanford on Software Complexity Reduction.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Parno quoted by WSJ on Intel chip flaws

The Wall Street Journal quoted Bryan Parno about Intel’s Spectre and Meltdown chip flaws.
Thursday, February 15, 2018

Parno receives 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship

The fellowship, awarded annually since 1955, honors early career scholars whose achievements put them among the very best scientific minds working today. Winners receive a two-year, $65,000 fellowship to further their research.
Monday, February 05, 2018

Celebrating "SSL," the unsung hero of online shopping

Bryan Parno says it’s hard to imagine modern online shopping without a protocol like SSL or TLS. If you can’t communicate securely with the shopping site, then all of the information you send or receive could be intercepted along the way.
Thursday, February 01, 2018

Parno quoted on Chronicle, Alphabet's newest cybersecurity company

Recently, Alphabet–Google's parent company–developed a new cybersecurity platform called Chronicle that companies can use to help comprehend their own security data.
Thursday, September 07, 2017

Improving web security without sacrificing performance

Chances are, you’re reading this article on a web browser that uses HTTPS, the protocol over which data is sent between a web browser and the website users are connected to. In fact, nearly half of all web traffic passes through HTTPS. Despite the “S” for security in “HTTPS,” this protocol is far from perfectly secure.
Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Meet the new ECE faculty members

As a new semester begins, we welcome four new faculty members to ECE. Meet Giulia Fanti, Carlee Joe-Wong, Gauri Joshi, and Bryan Parno.