NIKITA SAMARIN PhD Student at Berkeley in Cybersecurity & Privacy

ABOUT

About

Nikita Samarin is a doctoral student in Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley advised by Serge Egelman and David Wagner. His research focuses on computer security and privacy from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining approaches from human-computer interaction, behavioral sciences, and legal studies. Samarin is a member of the Berkeley Lab for Usable and Experimental Security (BLUES) and an affiliated graduate researcher at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) and the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI).

Samarin’s current projects examine the compliance of mobile apps with privacy regulation and security behavior of underrepresented and vulnerable populations. Past projects have also investigated challenges to the adoption of multi-factor authentication, security of machine learning algorithms, and biometric authentication.

Samarin is a Joint Fellow with the Center for Technology, Society and Policy (CTSP) and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) at UC Berkeley, an RSAC Security Scholar, and the recipient of the Scottish Young Software Engineer of the Year Award. Before coming to Berkeley, Samarin has previously worked as a research assistant at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and as a teaching assistant at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a BSc with Honors in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

PUBLICATIONS

  • Kulynych, B., Hayes, J., Samarin, N. and Troncoso, C., 2018. Evading classifiers in discrete domains with provable optimality guarantees. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.10939. Preprint.
  • Samarin, N., 2018. A Key to Your Heart: Biometric Authentication Based on ECG Signals. Project Report, Computer Science School of Informatics University of Edinburgh. Report.
  • Balagani, K.S., Conti, M., Gasti, P., Georgiev, M., Gurtler, T., Lain, D., Miller, C., Molas, K., Samarin, N., Saraci, E. and Tsudik, G., 2018, September. SILK-TV: Secret Information Leakage from Keystroke Timing Videos. In European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (pp. 263-280). Springer, Cham. Paper.