EAGER

This collaborative project explores teenagers' understanding and engagement with privacy, including tool development for strengthening the understanding management of privacy in digital media among U.S. teenagers. Through interviews and focus groups the PIs identify how sociocultural differences, like race and class, impact how teenagers engage with privacy both in their online presence and through their usage of devices and apps.

This project develops a holistic approach to sociotechnical system security that combines innovations in both criminology and engineering/computer science. We design unified sociotechnical security models that capture how sociotechnical intrusions against social as well as technical aspects of the system (i.e., modeled as hidden sequences of system security states) result in observed hard data such as security sensor alerts and soft data produced by human/social sensors such as reports about slow machines.

Recent advances in software-defined networking (SDN) and programmable data planes allow datacenter and enterprise network operators to quickly deploy new protocols, customize network behavior, and develop innovative services. These advances promise to improve and streamline network operations, improving the quality of service provided to end users. However programmable data planes also introduce new complexities to network management, notably, ensuring that the network satisfies critical security properties.

User behavior is a critical element in the success or failure of computer security protections. The field of Human Security Informatics (HSI) combines security informatics and human-computer interaction design to learn how the design of a human-computer interface can affect the security of a computer system. This research project is contributing to the scientific foundations of HSI by modeling how multitasking users behave when making security-critical decisions.

Cyber security is considered one of the most important aspects of our information technology based society. Key Exchange(KE) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, and authenticated KE (AKE) is one of the most used cryptographic tools in secure communication protocols (e.g. SSL/TLS, IPSec, SSH) over the Internet. In light of the threat that quantum computers pose to cryptosystems such as RSA and ECC, this project is devoted to the development of secure and efficient AKE alternatives for the post-quantum computer world, which is now considered of a high priority by the US government.