I am an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, Executive Director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, and affiliate faculty at the Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC). My research is primarily in the areas of distributed systems and networking, with a recent focus on privacy, security, transparency, and mobile systems.

My research approach is to combine science and engineering to understand and improve the performance, reliability, and security of Internet systems. With respect to science, I empirically measure computer systems that interact over the Internet to understand how well they match existing models and assumptions, then investigate the root causes for violations of those models/assumptions—often then leading to the design of new models. In many cases, our observations also suggest the design of systems that exploit previously unknown information about how our Internet-enabled systems work, and as an engineer I build and evaluate such systems in a way that other researchers, users, and policy makers can benefit from the result. To date, the software artifacts of my research have more than one million users, and my research teams have produced reports and datasets that informed additional research, policy debates, regulators, and legislators.

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Pronouns: He/him.

For those who don't know me, the following passage has become a theme that runs through my life. In short, I "push the rock," just like Sisyphus from Greek mythology. But Camus tells it better:

As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
-- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

David Choffnes, Associate Professor, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University. © 2024
Last updated November 27, 2023.