CAREER

Semiconductor chip fabrication is being increasingly outsourced to off-shore foundries. Outsourced fabrication reduces cost by leveraging economies-of-scale and ensures access to the most advanced manufacturing technology, but comes at the expense of trust. How can the chip designer trust that the off-shore (untrusted) foundry does not pirate its intellectual property (IP), or maliciously modify the integrated circuit (IC) by inserting a hardware Trojan in the chip? This project develops transformative new solutions for trustworthy chip fabrication at off-shore foundries.

This project aims to provide people with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments, better privacy tools when working with computers. Although information privacy is a concern for everyone, common tools such as spam-detecting captchas, password strength meters, security alert messages, and browser icons that indicate secure connections are often designed without considering people with visual impairments and thus are hard for this group to use.

In response to serious vulnerabilities that plague many of the Internet's core protocols, the last two decades have seen various security infrastructures layered on top of originally insecure protocols (DNSSEC on top of the domain name system, SSL and its public key infrastructure on top of TCP, the RPKI on top of interdomain routing). The security of each is derived from centralized authorities that are trusted to provide information about cryptographic keys or identities. When authorities behave correctly, each security infrastructure protects the underlying insecure system from attack.

Forged digital images or video can threaten reputations or impede criminal justice, due to falsified evidence. Over the past decade, researchers have developed a new class of security techniques known as 'multimedia forensics' to determine the origin and authenticity of multimedia information, such as potentially falsified images or videos. However, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have led to an overwhelming increase in the volume of multimedia information that must be forensically authenticated.

One of the most severe and challenging threats to Internet security and privacy is phishing, which uses fake websites to steal users' online identities and sensitive information. Existing studies have evaluated younger users' susceptibility to phishing attacks, but have not paid sufficient attention to elderly users' susceptibility to phishing in realistic environments.