Katz received BS degrees in mathematics and chemistry from MIT in 1996, followed by a master's degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1998. After transferring to the computer science department, he received M.Phil. and PhD degrees in computer science from Columbia University in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Katz's doctoral advisors were
Zvi Galil,
Moti Yung, and
Rafail Ostrovsky. While in graduate school, he worked as a research scientist at Telcordia Technologies (now ACS). Katz was on the faculty in the computer science department of the University of Maryland from 2002 to 2019. From 2013 to 2019 he was director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center there. He joined the Department of Computer Science of George Mason University as professor of computer science and Eminent Scholar in Cybersecurity in 2019, before returning to the University of Maryland one year later. In 2023, he took a leave of absence from the University of Maryland to serve as Chief Scientist at Dfns. Katz has held visiting positions at UCLA, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and the Ecole Normale Superieure. He was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group in 2009–2010. He also works as a consultant in the fields of cryptography and computer security. == Research ==