Sandra Siby

Sandra Siby is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), with an associated faculty role in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She is a co-PI at the Center for Cyber Security at NYUAD and leads the Haven Lab, focusing on privacy and security in emerging digital technologies.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
• MS in Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich
• BEng in Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore

Sandra's research is centered on cybersecurity and privacy, with a focus on empowering users through better control over their digital privacy. Her work spans web and IoT security, edge computing, trusted execution environments, and privacy-preserving machine learning. She investigates how digital services can be designed with privacy at the core, especially in the context of encrypted protocols, tracking mechanisms, and on-device computation.

Her recent publications, appearing in top venues like USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, and CCS, reflect a strong trend in analyzing and mitigating privacy threats in encrypted web traffic, tracking via link decoration, and deploying secure and private machine learning on edge devices using confidential computing architectures. Her research combines systems building, empirical analysis, and user-centric design.

Scientific Awards and Recognition:

• Patent: Apparatus and method for monitoring a wireless network
• SG Mark Good Design award (2016) for the National Science Experiment project
• Media coverage in BBC and The Register for her work on online tracking
• True Blue Award at Autodesk for verifying 100 defects in AutoCAD 2010

Sandra has advised and mentored students through capstone projects and research collaborations. She has secured research funding through institutional affiliations and is actively recruiting PhD students for her lab. She has taught courses in computer networks, web privacy, and capstone projects at NYUAD, and previously served as a teaching assistant at EPFL for graduate and undergraduate security courses.

She is actively involved in the cybersecurity research community, having co-founded the polygl0ts CTF team at EPFL and participated in events such as the MENA edition of CSAW. Her lab, Haven Lab, focuses on building practical and deployable privacy solutions for real-world systems.