Penn’s Schlein Center for Cybersecurity is a world leader in security and privacy by design, developing innovative approaches for building systems that are secure from the ground up. Our work is founded on three pillars: innovative system building that tackles hard problems through fresh insights and creative approaches; mathematics and formal logic that provide provable guarantees; and real-world validation, through experiments with realistic prototypes and analysis of data from deployed systems, that ensures our solutions address genuine needs and deliver measurable impact. Schlein Center researchers partner with experts in law, policy, economics, and health, as well as established and emerging industry leaders, to translate lab successes into real security and privacy improvements for organizations and society.
Today, the Schlein Center innovates across multiple interconnected research areas. We develop novel formal methods, which employ mathematical logic to prove that real software systems behave correctly and securely. We devise new cryptographic mechanisms to ensure key security and privacy goals with mathematical certainty. We design security-oriented programming languages that reduce or eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities. Ourdistributed systems work combines empirical analysis with innovative design to ensure security and privacy properties at scale. We build novel hardware as a foundation for trusted computing, and employ fuzzing and randomized testing—empirically-driven techniques—to scalably uncover subtle flaws that evade traditional assurance mechanisms. We specifically consider the role of the human, as a participant and recipient of security and privacy outcomes. In partnership with Penn’s ASSET Center for Trustworthy AI, we are expanding into machine learning for security, and security of machine learning—recognizing that ML is both a critical system component that must be secured and a powerful mechanism for advancing security itself.