About

I’m a Professor at University of California, Riverside. I’m affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the RAISE Institute. From 2013 to 2023, I was at University College London (UCL), where I served as Director of the Academic Center of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR) and Head of the Information Security Research Group (ISRG).

In September 2023, I started the Security and Privacy Advanced research Lab (SPALab). I got my PhD from UC Irvine, advised by Gene Tsudik. While in grad school, I did internships at NEC in Heidelberg (2008), INRIA Rhone-Alpes (2009), and Nokia in Lausanne (2010). After graduating, I worked as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC from 2011 to 2013.

Research

I am generally interested in impactful research in the broad Information Security field. Over the past few years, I have been focusing on trustworthy machine learning and socio-technical issues on the Web. I have published at top-tier conferences in security (IEEE S&P, NDSS, CCS, Usenix Security), machine learning (ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS), measurement (ACM IMC, SIGMETRICS) and other fields (e.g. WWW, ICWSM, CSCW, etc.)

My co-authors and I have received best paper awards from IEEE S&P, NDSS, ACM CCS, ACM IMC, ACM CSCW, AAAI ICWSM, and ACM WebSci, the Data Protection by Design Award from the Catalan Data Protection authority, and were runners-up for CSAW Applied Research Competitions and the INRIA-CNIL Privacy Protection Award. In 2025, I was named Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2022 and 2024, I achieved the top-4 security “grand slam” (uh?).

Education

• PhD in Networked Systems, Sep 2011
  University of California, Irvine
  Dissertation: Sharing Sensitive Information with Privacy
• BSc in Computer Science, Jul 2005
  University of Salerno, Italy
  Summa cum Laude, top 1% in graduating class

Note for prospective students

Sorry I can’t reply to every inquiry. The volume is just too high and, unfortunately, a big chunk of the emails are AI slop, so I had to stop reading them. Right now, I don’t work with MS students (and I’m not looking for readers/graders). I’m also not working with undergrads from outside UCR (if you’re a UCR undergrad, come to one of my classes). If you’re a high school student looking to do research, start your email subject with [High School Student Interested in Research].

If you want to do a PhD with me at UCR, just apply to the program; no need to email first. I promise I read every application that mentions my name, and I do it early. If there’s any chance it could work, I’ll reach out. I know you’d like a sense of fit before paying UCR’s non-refundable application fee, sorry! But I consider knowing whether our research interests match a prerequisite, and you can figure that out by skimming my papers.

Personal

I was born in Avellino, a small-ish town 40 miles east of Napoli surrounded by the mountains of the Irpinia region. Irpinia is known for its lush, green scenery and medieval castles, the glorious soccer team, hazelnuts, and black truffles, as well as some amazing wines like Taurasi, Fiano di Avellino, and Greco di Tufo.

In my free time, I enjoy guerilla activism against pineapple and chicken on pizza. I love traveling, and I’m (kinda) fluent in English, French, and Italian, and can utter enough words to get into trouble in German, Spanish, and Persian. My name is ‘Emiliano’ (first name) + ‘De Cristofaro’ (last name). ‘De’ is not a middle name, so please don’t call me Mr/Dr/Prof. Cristofaro – it’d be like calling Robert De Niro ‘Robert Niro’ (“you talking to me?”).