Erik Rye is an assistant research professor of computer science affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute and Institute for Assured Autonomy.
His research centers around empirical network security and privacy, particularly as motivated by threats that affect actual human beings on the internet; he is especially interested in finding ways that devices and users might be geolocated, fingerprinted, or otherwise tracked over time. Rye is equally motivated to collaborate with industry experts to develop mechanisms that protect users and devices from such threats, and as such has worked with Apple, SpaceX, and various Wi-Fi access point vendors to do so. Many of his projects revolve around collecting new internet-scale datasets, for which he develops new tools and techniques for collection and analysis.
Rye publishes in top-tier networking and security venues—such as the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), and the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy—and speaks at top security conventions like Black Hat USA. His accolades include a Best Paper Award at IMC and the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
Rye holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the United States Naval Academy, master’s degrees in computer science and applied mathematics from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland.