Kinan Dak Albab
Assistant Professor
SPACE Lab
Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, Boston University
Office: CDS 1336
Email: babman [at] bu [dot] edu
Interests: Computer systems, privacy-conscious systems, security, applied cryptography.
About Me
I am an Assistant Professor at Boston University, where I lead the Systems for Privacy and Compliance Engineering Lab (SPACE) Lab. I work on computer systems, specifically those aimed at improving end-user privacy and data security. My work heavily borrows tools from traditional systems research, databases, programming languages, and cryptography.
In Fall 2026, I am teaching DS 593: Privacy-Conscious Computer Systems. In Spring 2027, I will be teaching DS 210: Programming for Data Science in Rust. I run BU's explore data science research (ExploreDSR) in the spring.
I received my PhD from Brown University, advised by Malte Schwarzkopf. Before that, I received an MS in Computer Science from Boston University and a BS in Computer Science from the American University of Beirut, where I was fortunate to work with and be advised by Paul Attie.
I have also interned at Google on the NetInfra team, been a software engineering fellow at BU's Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL), been a visiting student with Dina Katabi and the Emerald Innovation team at MIT, and worked as a senior software engineer at InteractiveLife.
Prospective Students
Prospective PhD students: I am actively recruiting. Apply through the CDS PhD program, and please read the SPACE Lab's instructions for prospective students first.
Current BU students (all levels) and prospective visitors: I am always happy to work with motivated students. Read the same instructions to see how to get involved.
Current PhD Students
See the SPACE Lab for the full list of members and alumni.
Select Publications
- Corinn Tiffany, Artem Agvanian, Ziyun Song, Isabella Szabo, Kinan Dak Albab, Will Crichton, Philip Levis, Akshay Narayan, Deepti Raghavan, Malte Schwarzkopf. We Need to Talk About the Actual Guarantees of Rust-based Systems. PLOS, 2026.
- Kinan Dak Albab, Artem Agvanian, Allen Aby, Corinn Tiffany, Alexander Portland, Sarah Ridley, Malte Schwarzkopf. Sesame: Practical End-to-End Privacy Compliance with Policy Containers and Privacy Regions. SOSP, 2024.
- Kinan Dak Albab, Ishan Sharma, Justus Adam, Benjamin Kilimnik, Aaron Jeyaraj, Raj Paul, Artem Agvanian, Leonhard Spiegelberg, Malte Schwarzkopf. K9db: Privacy-Compliant Storage for Web Applications by Construction. OSDI, 2023.
- Kinan Dak Albab, Rawane Issa, Mayank Varia, Kalman Graffi. Batched Differentially Private Information Retrieval. USENIX Security, 2022 (extended version).
- Kinan Dak Albab, Rawane Issa, Andrei Lapets, Peter Flockhart, Lucy Qin, Ira Globus-Harris. Tutorial: Deploying Secure Multi-Party Computation on the Web Using JIFF. IEEE SecDev, 2019.
- Paul C. Attie, Kinan Dak Albab, Mouhammad Sakr. Model and Program Repair via SAT Solving. ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 2018.
See the full list of publications.
Recent Courses
- DS 593: Privacy-Conscious Computer Systems (Fall 2025)
- DS 210: Programming for Data Science (Spring 2027, Summer 2026, Spring 2026)
See the full list of courses.
Honors and Awards
- Shipley Academic Innovation Award, Boston University, 2026
- Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, Brown University, 2025
- Teaching Excellence Award, Boston University Department of Computer Science, 2020
- Mark Sawaya Excellence Award (Best Graduating Student in Computer Science), American University of Beirut, 2015
- 1st Place, ACM Lebanese Collegiate Programming Contest, 2015
- 1st Place, AUB Supernacci Math Programming Competition, 2015