He was a William L. Weiss Professor of Information and Communications Technology in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the Institute for Networking and Security Research at the Pennsylvania State University.
While he was a Senior Research Staff Member at AT&T Laboratories, McDaniel contributed to a joint study with the University of Pennsylvania on the source of unauthorized movie copies.
The follow-up projects Saint[9] and Kirin[10] are designed to provide enhanced application-provider specified security policy and to evaluate the privileges requested by applications when they are installed.
Long held in logical and physical isolation from other systems, telecommunications networks and other pieces of critical infrastructure are rapidly being assimilated into the Internet.
McDaniel demonstrated that with the bandwidth available to most cable modems, an adversary can launch attacks capable of denying voice service to cellular telecommunications networks in major cities.