Mikhail Atallah
Distinguished Professor of Computer Science
Joined department: Fall 1982
Education
Professor Atallah's research interests are in information security and algorithms. A Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE, his work on key management received the 2015 CCS Test of Time Award, and his work on multi-party computation received the 2021 ACSAC Test of Time Award. He was the 2017 recipient of the Arden L. Bement Jr. Award, the most prestigious award Purdue bestows in pure and applied science and engineering. He was the 2016 recipient of the Purdue Sigma Xi Faculty Research Award, and the 2013 recipient of the Purdue Outstanding Commercialization Award. He was a speaker ten times in the Distinguished Lecture Series of top Computer Science Departments, and was keynote and invited speaker at many national and international meetings, and has served on the editorial boards of top journals and on the program committees of top conferences and workshops. He was selected in 1999 as one of the best teachers in the history of Purdue University and included in Purdue's Book of Great Teachers, a permanent wall display of Purdue's best teachers past and present. In 2001 he co-founded Arxan Technologies Inc, to commercialize a software protection technology developed jointly with his doctoral student Hoi Chang (in 2019 Arxan reported that applications secured by it were running on over a billion devices, and in 2020 it reported 5+ billion deployed instances on protected applications "across many industries including financial services, mobile payments, healthcare, automotive, gaming, and entertainment"). He was CTO of Arxan Technologies and Chief Scientist for its defense subsidiary, Arxan Defense Systems. Arxan Defense Systems was acquired in 2010 by Microsemi Corporation, and Arxan Technologies was acquired in 2013 by private equity firm TA Associates.
Selected Publications
Marina Blanton, Mikhail J. Atallah, Keith B. Frikken, Qutaibah M. Malluhi, "Secure and Efficient Outsourcing of Sequence Comparisons", Proc. 17th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2012), Pisa, Italy, September 2012, pp. 505-522.
Hao Yuan, Mikhail J. Atallah, "Running Max/Min Filters Using 1+o(1) Comparisons per Sample", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Volume 33, No. 12, 2011, pp. 2544-2548.
Hao Yuan, Mikhail J. Atallah, "Data Structures for Range Minimum Queries in Multidimensional Arrays", Proc. of Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2010), Austin, Texas, 2010, pp. 150-160.
Mikhail J. Atallah, Marina Blanton, Nelly Fazio, and Keith B. Frikken, "Dynamic and Efficient Key Management for Access Hierarchies", ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, Vol. 12, 2009.