Christopher Kruegel is a professor in the computer science department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests are computer and communications security, with an emphasis on malware analysis and detection, web security and security in social networks. He enjoys building systems and making security tools available to the public. He has published more than 100 conference and journal papers, and is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Technology Review TR35 Award for young innovators, an IBM Faculty Award, and several best paper awards.
The main focus of his research is systems security. He seeks to create solutions that solve important security issues affecting a large number of users. The goal of his work is to build security systems, deploy them in real-world environments and perform experiments to characterize and explain their behavior. He believes that creating working systems that address real-world problems not only provides a great incentive for his research, but also allows for the necessary sanity checks of the results. As part of his research, he has contributed to systems that analyze programs to determine whether they are malicious or not (both for x86 binaries and mobile phone application). He also has worked on systems that scan the code of web applications to find vulnerabilities. Finally, he has worked on novel ways to break privacy on social networks as well as on ways to improve them such that those attacks no longer work.
He is working on a UC Noyce Initiative research collaboration with David Wagner from UC Berkeley and Hao Chan from UC Davis called "AI for Cybersecurity."