EAGER

As social media becomes a primary news source, rumors can spread widely in a short time. In recent cases, the rapid spread of misinformation caused social panic, had a dramatic financial impact, and put individuals and communities at great risk. Even when correct information is eventually disseminated, large delays can have devastating consequences. To determine how vulnerable networks are to misinformation spread, and to develop effective proactive and reactive counter-measures, it is necessary to study rumor propagation.

Large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks pose an imminent threat to the availability of critical Internet-based operations, as demonstrated by recent incidents that brought down a number of highly popular web services such as Twitter, Spotify and Reddit. While several solutions to counter DDoS attacks have been proposed by both industry and academia, most of the solutions that are currently deployed on the Internet - such as traffic scrubbing - tend to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks close to the victim edge network, once the attack has already caused damage.

Cloud storage is currently experiencing explosive growth as more and more businesses and organizations store large amounts of data on cloud servers. Encrypting such data provides security against untrusted servers or malicious intrusions. However, standard encryption has the drawback of compromising functionality and efficiency and it is so strong that its ciphertexts are not searchable. For this reason, searchable encryption (SE) has become an important research area, aimed at providing weaker forms of encryption that balance security, efficiency, and functionality goals.

Bullying has lasting negative psychological and physical effects on victims, bystanders, and bullies alike; online settings can magnify both the scale and impact of these effects, as anonymity can embolden people to make hostile posts about individuals or groups. This project aims to reduce the prevalence of such posts through the design of active, automated "bystander interventions" in online comment threads.

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.