Cristina Nita-Rotaru
(she/her/hers)
Professor

Research interests
- Distributed systems and network security
- Insider-resilient systems
- Analytics for security and fault tolerance
- Automated testing and verification
Education
- PhD, Johns Hopkins University
- MS, Politechnica University of Bucharest — Romania
- BS, Politechnica University of Bucharest —Romania
Biography
Cristina Nita-Rotaru is a professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston. She is a founding member of Northeastern's Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute.
Nita-Rotaru's research lies at the intersection of security, distributed systems, and computer networks. Her overarching goal is to design and build secure and resilient distributed systems and network protocols.
Before joining Northeastern, Nita-Rotaru was a faculty member at Purdue University. While there, she received a host of university awards, including the College of Science Research Award, the Excellence in Research Award, the College of Science Leadership Award, the College of Science Undergraduate Advising Award, and the Teaching for Tomorrow Award. She also earned an NSF CAREER Award in 2006.
Nita-Rotaru has served on the technical program committee of numerous conferences in security, networking, and distributed systems, including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, ACM Wisec, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE/IFIP DSN, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNEXT, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICNP, and WWW. She was an assistant director for CERIAS and is currently a member of the ACM Wisec and IEEE/IFIP DSN steering committees, as well as a member of the IFIP Working Group on Dependable Computing and Fault-tolerance.
Nita-Rotaru was also a multi-year associate editor for Elsevier Computer Communications, IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security, Computer Networks, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems.
Projects
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Bridging the Gap Between Protocol Design and Implementation through Automated Mapping
Lead PI: Stavros TripakisCo PI: Cristina Nita-Rotaru
Recent publications
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Exploiting Temporal Vulnerabilities for Unauthorized Access in Intent-based Networking
Citation: Ben Weintraub, Jiwon Kim, Ran Tao, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Hamed Okhravi, Dave (Jing) Tian, Benjamin E. Ujcich. (2024). Exploiting Temporal Vulnerabilities for Unauthorized Access in Intent-based Networking CCS, 3630-3644. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3670301 -
Payout Races and Congested Channels: A Formal Analysis of Security in the Lightning Network
Citation: Ben Weintraub, Satwik Prabhu Kumble, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Stefanie Roos. (2024). Payout Races and Congested Channels: A Formal Analysis of Security in the Lightning Network CCS, 2562-2576. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3670315 -
Rolling in the Shadows: Analyzing the Extraction of MEV Across Layer-2 Rollups
Citation: Christof Ferreira Torres, Albin Mamuti, Ben Weintraub, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Shweta Shinde. (2024). Rolling in the Shadows: Analyzing the Extraction of MEV Across Layer-2 Rollups CCS, 2591-2605. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3690259 -
More than a Fair Share: Network Data Remanence Attacks against Secret Sharing-based Schemes
Citation: Leila Rashidi, Daniel Kostecki, Alexander James, Anthony Peterson, Majid Ghaderi, Samuel Jero, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Hamed Okhravi, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini. (2021). More than a Fair Share: Network Data Remanence Attacks against Secret Sharing-based Schemes NDSS. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/more-than-a-fair-share-network-data-remanence-attacks-against-secret-sharing-based-schemes/ -
Leveraging Textual Specifications for Grammar-Based Fuzzing of Network Protocols
Citation: Samuel Jero, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Dan Goldwasser, Cristina Nita-Rotaru. (2019). Leveraging Textual Specifications for Grammar-Based Fuzzing of Network Protocols AAAI, 9478-9483. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33019478 -
Cross-App Poisoning in Software-Defined Networking
Citation: Benjamin E. Ujcich, Samuel Jero, Anne Edmundson, Qi Wang , Richard Skowyra, James Landry, Adam Bates , William H. Sanders, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Hamed Okhravi. (2018). Cross-App Poisoning in Software-Defined Networking CCS, 648-663. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243734.3243759 -
Manipulating Machine Learning: Poisoning Attacks and Countermeasures for Regression Learning
Citation: Manipulating Machine Learning: Poisoning Attacks and Countermeasures for Regression Learning Matthew Jagielski, Alina Oprea, Chang Liu, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, and Bo Li IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2018 -
Taking a Long Look at QUIC: An Approach for Rigorous Evaluation of Rapidly Evolving Transport Protocols
Citation: Arash Molavi Kakhki, Samuel Jero, David Choffnes, Alan Mislove, and Cristina Nita-Rotaru In Proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'17), London, United Kingdom, Nov 2017. -
Chizpurfle: A Gray-Box Android Fuzzer for Vendor Service Customizations
Citation: Antonio Ken Iannillo, Roberto Natella, Domenico Cotroneo, Cristina Nita-Rotaru. IEEE ISSRE 2017, September 2017 -
BEADS: Automated Attack Discovery in OpenFlow-based SDN Systems
Citation: Samuel Jero, Xiangyu Bu, Hamed Okhravi, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Richard Skowyra, Sonia Fahmy. RAID 2017, September 2017 -
Identifier Binding Attacks and Defenses in Software-Defined Networks
Citation: Samuel Jero, William Koch, Richard Skowyra, Hamed Okhravi, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, David Bigelow. USENIX Security 2017, August 2017 -
Analyzing Operational Behavior of Stateful Protocol Implementations for Detecting Semantic Bugs
Citation: Endadul Hoque, Omar Chowdhury, Sze Yiu Chau, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Ninghui Li. IEEE DSN 2017, June 2017 -
SymCerts: Practical Symbolic Execution For Exposing Noncompliance in X.509 Certificate Validation Implementations
Citation: Sze Yiu Chau, Omar Chowdhury, Endadul Hoque, Huangyi Ge, Aniket Kate, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Ninghui Li. IEEE Security and Privacy, May 2017
Related news
Current PhD students
Previous PhD students
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Alesia Chernikova
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Matthew Jagielski
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Talha Ongun
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Max von Hippel