Eric Wustrow Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

CSE Ph.D. student Eric Wustrow has been awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. NSF Graduate Research Fellowships are the most prestigious awards available to students beginning their graduate studies in the sciences.

Mr. Wustrow is a first-year PhD student working with Professor J. Alex Halderman. HIs research focuses on developing technologies to support freedom and government transparency throughout the world. Over the past year,he has worked to expose vulnerabilities in insecure electronic voting systems in the US and abroad, and has made recommendations to strengthen their security. he is also developing new tools for circumventing Internet censorship. In the future, he plans to continue studying the techniques used in computer security attacks, and to find ways to repurpose them toward benevolent goals.

This photo is of a “look-alike” vote-tallying LCD that was used in a recent research project that exposed multiple vulnerabilities in India’s electronic voting system. The display, which Mr. Wustrow helped design, added parts, hidden under the LEDs, that substitute dishonest vote totals when showing election results.

In addition to Mr. Wustrow, U-M CSE undergraduates Jeffrey Duperret and Guha Balakrishnan also received NSF GRF fellowships to pursue their graduate studies.

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The National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions.