About the Lab

The Measurable Security Lab (MSL) researches highly complex and high-impact areas of cybersecurity and privacy in today's Internet. The aesthetic of this research is that many foundational security and privacy protections should themselves be evaluable through conscientious measurements, data curation, and analyses. Based on the

Measurement and subjects of analyses include the Domain Name System (DNS), the Border Gateway Protocol's (BGP's) inter-domain routing, Named-Data Networking (NDN), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and more. Research and evaluation of core protections and infrastructure is leveraged to create evaluable security models and investigate security and privacy research on inter-administrative settings like fifth generations (5G) networks and systems, Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, and mobile Health (mHealth). MSL's development of cybersecurity tools, endpoint protections, and protocols are based largely on the DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), and are available on GitHub

The MSL is directed by Professor Eric Osterweil.

Contact Details

Nguyen Engineering Hall (ENGR) 5346
George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 US

Public Software

  • libCanute -- A C++ library for DANE protocols, focusing on secure email
  • Vantages -- A C++ library for developing high-speed parallel DNS/DNSSEC queries.
  • jacksniff -- A simple tool that uses Vantages to issue DNS queries to domain names across an IP prefix.
  • dns-spew -- A tool that uses Vantages to issue DNS queries for A records, to DNS domain names that will log all of the responses, even when more than one response is received.
  • Full list of code -- The code for MSL is maintained on our GitHub project