Collaborative

Household Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are intended to collect information in the home and to communicate with each other, to create powerful new applications that support our day-to-day activities. Existing research suggests that users have a difficult time selecting their privacy settings on such devices. The goal of this project is to investigate how, why and when privacy decisions of household IoT users are suboptimal, and to use the insights from this research to create and test a simple single user interface that integrates privacy settings across all devices within a household.

Many networking protocols have been designed without security in mind, and many cryptographic schemes have been designed without practical deployments in mind. Moreover, most of security-enhanced communication protocols still lack the provable-security treatment and hence the security guarantees. This project aims at bridging the gap between protocol design, implementation, deployment, and security guarantees by developing a novel general security framework that facilitates the provable-security analyses of practical networking protocols.

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), along with the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, are responsible for securing Internet transactions such as banking, email, and e-commerce; they provide users with the ability to verify with whom they are communicating online, and enable encryption of those communications. While the use of the PKI is mostly automated, there is a surprising amount of human intervention in management tasks that are crucial to its proper operation.

Security and privacy play a key role in areas such as health, energy, and smart cities, as well as constituting a grand challenge in and of themselves. Privacy and security are critical for realizing Big Data's promise to advance society. If data are used without regard to privacy of individuals or protection of the data, then individuals may be hurt. If the data?s authenticity is not guaranteed, or if data are not permitted to be used at all due to privacy and security concerns, then the data's value is not realized.

When users store their data in the cloud, they take many privacy risks: Will the cloud storage provider allow others to see that data? If the user sets sharing rules for the data, will the cloud storage system follow those rules? Recent news stories of user data exfiltration from cloud storage systems show that users have reason for concern. Encrypting files before storing them in the cloud would provide strong protection, but this approach makes it very difficult for users to share data with others and to change their sharing policies.