Cybersecurity REU at NYIT

A research-focused undergraduate experience investigating how secure systems are reasoned about, evaluated, and explained through the lens of cybersecurity and applied cryptography.

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Research context

Turning security questions into structured evidence.

The Cybersecurity REU at NYIT placed Asim Yel in a research environment where systems thinking, careful reading, and technical communication mattered as much as implementation. The work centered on understanding how security claims are framed: what is being protected, who the adversary is, which assumptions must hold, and how evidence can be made reproducible.

Rather than treating cybersecurity as a single toolset, the project approached it as a layered discipline. Network behavior, secure software design, privacy constraints, authentication flows, and cryptographic primitives were studied together so that each artifact could explain both the mechanism and the risk it addresses.

Project showcase

Selected research artifacts

A compact view of the materials produced and refined during the REU: research maps, experiment records, cryptography explanations, and presentation-ready summaries.

01 · Research map

Security problem framing

Organized literature notes into a threat-centered map that separated assets, adversaries, assumptions, mitigations, and open questions.

02 · Experiment log

Reproducible notes

Maintained structured logs for hypotheses, setup details, observations, and follow-up questions so findings could be revisited and explained.

03 · Visual explanation

Cryptography diagrams

Built diagrams that connected keys, messages, hashes, signatures, and verification steps to everyday security guarantees.

04 · Research communication

From technical work to presentation narrative

Translated dense research material into a clear sequence: motivation, system model, methodology, findings, limitations, and future work.

Responsibilities

What Asim contributed

The role combined research discipline with practical security thinking: reading, modeling, implementing, documenting, and presenting.

  1. 01

    Literature review and synthesis

    Read technical papers and background material, then distilled the important claims, assumptions, terminology, and unanswered questions into usable notes.

  2. 02

    Threat modeling

    Identified protected assets, attacker capabilities, trust boundaries, and failure modes so the research could be evaluated against realistic scenarios.

  3. 03

    Technical exploration

    Used scripting, controlled experiments, and annotated diagrams to test ideas and make security mechanisms easier to reason about.

  4. 04

    Documentation and presentation

    Prepared research summaries that connected motivation, method, evidence, cryptographic relevance, and limitations for technical audiences.

Skills

A research toolkit for secure systems.

Research methods

  • Literature review
  • Research synthesis
  • Experiment documentation
  • Technical presentation

Security practice

  • Threat modeling
  • Risk analysis
  • Authentication concepts
  • Secure protocol reasoning

Technical fluency

  • Python scripting
  • Command-line workflows
  • Data interpretation
  • Diagramming complex systems
Message
Hash
Key
Integrity proof

Cryptography connection

Cryptography gave the research its vocabulary of trust.

The project connected cybersecurity questions to the primitives that make modern systems defensible. Hash functions helped explain integrity and tamper evidence. Symmetric encryption introduced confidentiality and key-management tradeoffs. Public-key signatures clarified identity, verification, and non-repudiation. Protocol reasoning tied these ideas to real system behavior.

Asim’s focus was not only on how a primitive works in isolation, but on what guarantee it provides, where that guarantee can fail, and how to communicate those limits without oversimplifying them.

Reflection

A foundation for security-minded engineering.

The REU strengthened Asim’s ability to move between theory and implementation: reading carefully, questioning assumptions, building evidence, and communicating the security story behind a technical system.

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