Collaborative

As Internet of Things (IoT) systems become deployed more widely, their security is becoming a serious concern in many domains, including smart homes, autonomous cars, or industrial control systems. Security exploits in IoT systems can lead to loss of privacy, data theft, financial losses, and even physical harm. The proposed work will develop a novel approach to harden security of IoT systems via cross-layer defense. The approach will be developed and evaluated in collaboration among three participating institutions in the US and Brazil.

The objective of this project is to investigate the security of fingerprint authentication systems, especially those using partial fingerprints. A number of consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, are beginning to incorporate fingerprint sensors for user authentication. The sensors embedded in these devices are generally very small and the resulting images are, therefore, limited in size.

Today's mobile applications and services display information to the user via a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Unfortunately, an attacker may tamper with that display, maliciously hiding, altering, or entirely fabricating display contents. User apps or the cloud services providing the information may be entirely unaware of the tampering. Mobile operating systems, such as Android and iOS, cannot guarantee the integrity and correctness of the app GUI content.

Increasingly, decisions and actions affecting people's lives are determined by automated systems processing personal data. Excitement about these systems has been accompanied by serious concerns about their opacity and the threats that they pose to privacy, fairness, and other values. Recognizing these concerns, the investigators seek to make real-world automated decision-making systems accountable for privacy and fairness by enabling them to detect and explain violations of these values. The technical work is informed by, and applied to, online advertising, healthcare, an

On-line sharing of images has become a key enabler of users' connectivity. Various types of images are shared through social media to represent users' interests and experiences. While extremely convenient and socially valuable, this level of pervasiveness introduces acute privacy concerns. First, once shared images may go anywhere, as copying / resharing images is straightforward. Second, the information disclosed through an image reveals aspects of users' private lives, affecting both the owner and other subjects in the image.