Collaborative

Designing secure systems and validating security of existing systems are hard challenges facing our society. For implementing secure applications, a serious stumbling block lies in the generation of a correct system specification for a security policy. It is non-trivial for both system designers and end users to express their intent in terms of formal logic. Similar challenges plague users' trying to validate security properties of existing applications, such as web or cloud based services, which often have no formal specifications.

The proliferation and increasing sophistication of censorship warrants continuing efforts to develop tools to evade it. Yet, designing effective mechanisms for censorship resistance ultimately depends on accurate models of the capabilities of censors, as well as how those capabilities will likely evolve. In contrast to more established disciplines within security, censorship resistance is relatively nascent, not yet having solid foundations for understanding censor capabilities or evaluating the effectiveness of evasion technologies.

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.

The Internet of Things integrates the virtual world of computers into real-world applications, leading to better efficiency, economy and an improved quality of life. This requires a huge amount of tiny computers, and this project addresses the challenge of powering those computers in a sustainable manner. Tiny computers can run off harvested energy sources such as solar, vibration and/or temperature gradient. The project objective is to show how such energy-constrained devices can support secure and full Internet connectivity.

This research is developing methods that leverage a multitude of sensors embedded in hand-held and wearable devices (e.g., smart watches, smart glasses and brain-computer interfaces) for strong user authentication to smart phones. The current point-of-entry solutions, largely based on weak static credentials, such as passwords or PINs for authentication to smart phones are not sufficient because once such credentials are compromised (which is very likely given the many vulnerabilities of passwords), the attacker may gain unfettered access to the smart phone.