RYAN KOVATCH

The Teaching Security Operations Center (TSOC) at the University of Oregon immerses students in a real-world, fully operational SOC, where they rotate through critical roles and gain practical expertise in defending against today’s evolving cyber threats. Throughout grad school, I worked with the lead engineer to build out the TSOC’s internal infrastructure. They now enjoy a fully fleshed-out system of industry-standard security platforms and tools.

A new encryption scheme called registration-based encryption (RBE), developed within the last decade, allows for the binding of public keys to identities without certificates. This presents a new avenue for avoiding the traditional pitfalls of public-key infrastructure. My Master's thesis aimed to evaluate whether present RBE constructions could be applied to Internet protocols at scale. This included producing a proof-of-concept encrypted DNS protocol called ReDNS -- the first of its kind.