I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. I am interested in human aspects of security, especially those involving human-computer interaction, privacy on the Internet, information leakage in distributed systems, and side channel attacks. I also try to leverage brain-inspired computer architectures to solve computationally hard problems.

From 2016-2018, I was a Postdoc and then Computer Scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, working on keylogging side channel attacks and neuromorphic computing.

News

• Program Co-Chair of the 2021 SADFE Workshop
• Best Paper @ CHI’20 for work in covert impairments in HCI
• Member of the SecureComm’20 Program Committee

Old news

• Paper on scaling up keystroke biometrics accepted to IJCB’20
• Member of the WTMC’20 Program Committee
• Invited talk for the Rotary Club of Corral de Tierra (July 2020)
• Paper on covert impairments in human computer interaction accepted to CHI’20
• Invited talk at the Sunset Center (Carmel, CA), hosted by the Carmel Public Library Foundation (February 2020) [slides]
• Autocomplete side channel paper accepted to USENIX’19
• Member of the WTMC’19 Program Committee
• Invited talk at the 20th Monterey Workshop on Cyber (November 2018)
• Joined NPS as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science (August 2018)
• SoK paper on keylogging side channels accepted to S&P’18
• Best Paper @ ISCAS’17 for work on factoring integers with a neuromorphic processor

Students

MS students

• Andy Baierwalter (radar network traffic analysis)
• Chris Daves (user identification over VoIP)
• Fritz Hain (circumventing digital censorship)
• Harlan Cheer (decision confidence estimation in HCI)
• Jamie Francona (deception detection in virtual environments)
• Jihye Kim (interactive web application side channels)
• Ray Blockmon / Natasha Niemann (network traffic insider threat detection)

MS Alumni

• Cassondra Bullock / Jeana Verkempinck / Alexander Arnell (information leakage in chat application network traffic)
• Greg Bunder / Michael Laws (network traffic anomaly detection)
• John Smith / Nicholas Hughes (digital signatures on darknet marketplaces)
• Brett Rajchel (network traffic monitoring for insider threat detection)
• Eric Kim (biologically-inspired automatic target detection, classification, and tracking)
• Xisen Tian (radar imagery deep fakes through a man-in-the-middle attack)
• Yao Wen Loy (Air Force, Singapore) / Zhenfeng Lee (Singapore) (behavioral Bitcoin address clustering heuristics)
• Rouben Azad (modeling ship behavior using AIS)
• Peter Goodwin (obfuscating keystroke dynamics)
• Michael Walker (author identification through text composition)
• Mark Veazey (Internet-scale keystroke biometrics and privacy)
• Ryan Keller (modeling trust between human and AI)
• Nathan Richardson / Lucas Burke (eliciting identifying behavior from a social engineer)

Teaching

• AY21 spring: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310)
• AY21 fall: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310)
• AY20 spring: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310)
• AY20 fall: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310)
• AY19 spring: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310) and Machine Learning/Data Mining (CS4315)
• AY19 winter: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310)
• AY19 fall: Artificial Intelligence (CS3310)

Awards

• Best paper, CHI’20
• Best Paper, ISCAS’17
• Best Paper, UEMCON’17
• Runner-up Neuromorph of the Year, Telluride NCEW’16
• 1st Place, Keystroke Biometrics Ongoing Competition
• 3rd Place, Look & Click Competition
• 1st Place, The Second Eye Movements Verification and Identification Competition
• One of Westchester’s Top Professionals Under 30

Select publications

See the full list and Google Scholar.

• Bug or Feature? Covert Impairments to Human Computer Interaction
  John V. Monaco
  2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020) Best Paper Award (top 1%) [pdf]

• What Are You Searching For? A Remote Keylogging Attack on Search Engine Autocomplete
  John V. Monaco
  28th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX 2019) [pdf] [code]

• SoK: Keylogging Side Channels
  John V. Monaco
  39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2018) [pdf]

• Factoring Integers with a Brain-Inspired Computer
  John V. Monaco, Manuel M. Vindiola
  IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, 2017 [pdf]

• The Partially Observable Hidden Markov Model and its Application to Keystroke Dynamics
  John V. Monaco, Charles C Tappert
  Pattern Recognition, 2017 [pdf]

Contact

Email: contact at [this domain]

Find me on:

• Twitter
• Github
• ResearchGate
• LinkedIn
• Google Scholar