I’m a Lead Data Scientist on the Security Engineering team at Visa Inc. My interests include digital payments, security/privacy issues 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.

Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Before that, I was a Computer Scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, working on keylogging side channel attacks and neuromorphic computing.

See my bio, curriculum vitae, research statement, and teaching statement.

News

• I joined Visa Inc. as a lead data scientist (November 2021)
• Paper on device fingerprinting accepted to S&P’22

Old 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
• 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

See also old press.

Students

See Calhoun for a list of theses I advised.

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.

• Device Fingerprinting with Peripheral Timestamps
  John V. Monaco
  43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2022) [pdf]

• 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]