
Dr. Rahat Masood is currently working as an Associate Lecturer at the School of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), UNSW. Her research area focuses on the security and privacy of mobile, web, and IoT platforms, network security, and critical infrastructure protection. More recently, her research has involved privacy risks identification and quantification, and privacy-preserving technologies, particularly from human behaviour perspective. She received her PhD from the UNSW, in collaboration with the information security and privacy group at Data61-CSIRO. Before joining UNSW, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Data61-CSIRO, where she designed and evaluated privacy-preserving algorithms as required by diverse application scenarios.
Rahat is currently associated with Data61-CSIRO as a visiting scholar and also collaborating with Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) on multiple cyber security projects. She was also a visiting scholar at the Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), New Mexico, and Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CSPRI) at The George Washington University. Her Master's degree is in Computer & Communication Security from NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), Pakistan, and Bachelor's degree is in Software Engineering (Honours).
User-Oriented Privacy for Mobile and Web Platforms, CSE School Funding for Early Career Researchers, 2020.
Rahat is currently involved in multiple research projects with internal and external collaborators. She is currently supervising Taste of Research (ToR) summer student on the project titled "Impact of Social Media Networks on COVID-19 Expansion and Containment". This project is a joint collaboration with Macquarie University to understand the pandemic situation through the lens of social media platforms (e.g. Twiiter). In addition, the project involves misinformation/rumors analysis related to COVID-19 along with indepth analysis of privacy and security leakages.
Rahat is also collaborating with Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCSRC) on multiple grant proposals and projects. She is also working as a Visiting Scientist at Information Security and Privacy (ISP) Group at Data61-CSIRO and is co-supervising a summer student.
My Research Supervision
Rahat is currently supervising two summer scholarship students:
1. Haesun Shim - Taste of Research (ToR) scholarship student on the project "Impact of Social Media Networks on COVID-19 Containment and Expansion".
2. Ming Lo - Data61 Summer Scholar student on the project "user Touch Gesture-based Mobile Bot Detection for Crowd-Sourcing Applications".
My Teaching
Rahat's teaching interests combine the areas of cybersecurity and software engineering. More particularly, she is interested in teaching courses related to privacy, information security, network security, web and application security, and software engineering.