I am a Software Engineer at Google, and I work on privacy. I graduated with a PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have been working on projects related to the privacy and security infrastructure that supports large-scale applications: security monitoring, logging, and auditing, authentication, and authorization.

While at Illinois, I worked on security monitoring systems that move away from the model of centralized collection of all logging data for analysis. I showed that, even if the data is maintained in separated monitoring servers, we can still detect complex security problems which require correlating information collected across multiple data sources: we just need to share a minimal amount of information that depends on what each monitoring system is observing at the time.

The techniques presented in the papers below can be used to build monitoring systems that span across multiple organizations with minimal sharing of information, and can be used to build monitoring systems where there is no single node that can be compromised to give you a complete control of the monitoring infrastructure.

Teaching

Teaching is fun! I have been teaching a few courses at Illinois.

Publications

Below there is a list of my publications divided by projects. Feel free to contact me for any questions at mirko.montanari at gmail

Distributed Security Monitoring

• Mirko Montanari, Jun Ho Hun, Rakesh B. Bobba, Roy H. Campbell, Limiting Data Exposure in Monitoring Multi-domain Policy Conformance, TRUST 2013.
• Mirko Montanari, Ellick Chan, Kevin Larson, Wucherl Yoo, Roy H. Campbell Distributed Security Policy Conformance, Computer & Security (2013) pp. 28-40. (journal version)
• Mirko Montanari, Jun Ho Huh, Derek Dagit, Rakesh Bobba and Roy H. Campbell, Evidence of Log Integrity in Policy-based Security Monitoring, Workshop on Dependability of Clouds, Data Centers and Virtual Machine Technology (DCDV 2012), in conjunction with EEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2012)
• Mirko Montanari, Roy H. Campbell, Confidentiality of Event Data in Policy-based Monitoring, IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2012), June 2012.
• Mirko Montanari, Lucas T. Cook, Roy H. Campbell, Multi-Organization Policy-based Monitoring, IEEE POLICY 2012, July 2012.
• Mirko Montanari, Roy H. Campbell, Attack-resilient Compliance Monitoring for Large Distributed Infrastructure Systems, IEEE International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS), Sept 2011.
• Mirko Montanari, Ellick Chan, Kevin Larson, Wucherl Yoo, Roy H. Campbell, Distributed Security Policy Conformance, IFIP SEC 2011, Lucerne, Switzerland, June 2011. (selected as one of the best papers and invited to a journal special issue)
• Mirko Montanari, Roy H. Campbell, Multi-Aspect Security Configuration Assessment, Workshop on Assurable & Usable Security Configuration (SafeConfig), Collocated with ACM CCS 2009, ACM, Chicago, 2009

Monitoring and trust in Cloud Computing

• Roy H. Campbell, Mirko Montanari, Reza Farivar, Middleware for Assured Clouds, Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2011. (journal version)
• Jun Ho Huh, Mirko Montanari, Derek Dagit, Rakesh B. Bobba, Dong Wook Kim, Yoonjoo Choi and Roy Campbell, An empirical study on the software integrity of virtual appliances: are you really getting what you paid for?, ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) 2013
• John Bellessa, Evan Kroske, Reza Farivar, Mirko Montanari, Kevin Larson, Roy H. Campbell, NetODESSA: Dynamic Policy Enforcement in Cloud Networks, 2011 30th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems Workshops, 2011.

Security of Critical Infrastructure Systems

• Anwar, Z., Montanari M., Gutierrez A., and Campbell R. H., Budget constrained optimal security hardening of control networks for critical cyber-infrastructures, International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, Volume 2, Issue 1-2, May 2009.
• Mirko Montanari, Roy H. Campbell, Krishna Sampigethaya, Mingyan Li, A Security Policy Framework for eEnabled Fleets and Airports, 2011 IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, March 2011.
• Mirko Montanari, Mingyan Li, Krishna Sampigethaya, Roy H. Campbell, A Formal Security Model for Networked Control Systems, AIAA InfoTech@Aerospace, Seattle, WA, AIAA, 2009.
• Mirko Montanari, Roy H. Campbell, Multi-Aspect Security Assessment of Airport Computer Networks, AIAA Infotech@Aerospace, Atlanta, GA, AIAA, 2010

Event-based Systems and Misc

• Christopher Johnson, Mirko Montanari, Roy H. Campbell, Automatic Management of Logging Infrastructure, Center for Academic Excellence Workshop on Insider Threat, CAE, St Luis, 2010 (selected as one of the best papers for a presentation at NSA)
• Jafarpour, H., Mehrotra S., Venkatasubramanian N., and Montanari M., MICS: An Efficient Content Space Representation Model for Publish/Subscribe Systems, ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS) 2009, Nashville, TN, USA, ACM, 2009.
• Riccardo Crepaldi, Mirko Montanari, Indranil Gupta, and Robin Kravets, Using Failure Models for Controlling Data Availability in Wireless Sensor Networks, INFOCOM Mini-Conference, Brazil, IEEE, 2009.
• Montanari, M., Mehrotra S., and Venkatasubramanian N., Architecture for an Automatic Customized Warning System, IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, 2007.
• Crepaldi, R., Montanari M., Czyzewsky S., Campbell R. H., and Kravets R., Event Detection Using Phenomenon Models, ACM / USENIX MobiSys, Kraków, Poland, ACM, 2009 (poster)
• Farivar, R., Montanari M., Chan E., and Campbell R., An Automatic User Study Demo in Indoor Environments and its Privacy Implications, IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), Galveston, Texas, USA, 2009 (demo)