EAGER

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: PRICE: Using process tracing to improve household IoT users' privacy decisions

Submitted by alfredkobsa on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 1:54pm

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.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Unattended/Automated Studies of Effects of Auditory Distractions on Users Performing Security-Critical Tasks

Submitted by alfredkobsa on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 1:47pm

User errors or delays while performing security-critical tasks can lead to undesirable or even disastrous consequences. The impact of both accidental and intentional distractions on users in such situations has received little investigation. In particular, it is unclear whether and how sensory stimuli (e.g., sound or light) influence users' behavior and trigger mistakes. Better understanding of the effects of such distractions can lead to increased user awareness and countermeasures.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Quantifying Information Leakage in Searchable Encryption

Submitted by Alexandra Boldyreva on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 1:19pm

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.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Exploration of THz Backscattering as a Side-channel in Computer Systems

Submitted by Alenka Zajic on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 12:24pm

This project looks into a new side channel information that attackers can use to learn a computer chip design. This is important for advancing the science for understanding what vulnerabilities there are from this side channel.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Creating a TTP Ecosystem Discovery and Support Resource for Cybersecurity Technology Transfer to Practice

Submitted by Yasinsac on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 12:10pm

The 2011 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Plan cites "Accelerating Transition to Practice (TTP)" as one of five strategic objectives in the Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Program Component Area. TTP remains a strategic objective of Agencies which fund cybersecurity research, including NSF. However, the NSF cybersecurity portfolio contains only a small amount of security research that has been transitioned into operational activities.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Sonifying Cyber-Security Cues for Internet Users Who Are Visually Impaired

Submitted by asiamina on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 11:42am

The Internet is one of the primary communication media for users who are visually impaired. However, the vulnerability of this underserved population of Internet users to various forms of cyber-attacks has deteriorated the effective use of online services offered for general Internet users. The screen reader tools often overwhelm users with visual disability by providing large amounts of text, which may lead those users to ignore that information. An ignored security warning may harm users and make them vulnerable to various forms of cyber-threats.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Guaranteed-Secure and Searchable Genomic Data Repositories

Submitted by Adam ONeill on Mon, 10/16/2017 - 11:23am

Publicly available and searchable genomic data banks could revolutionize clinical and research settings, but privacy concerns about releasing such information are currently preventing its usage. This project aims to address these concerns by providing new mechanisms by which individuals can donate their genomic information to a data bank in such a way that third parties, such as doctors or researchers, querying the data bank are guaranteed to learn only aggregate functions of the population's data that the individuals authorize.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Faster and Stronger Onion Routing (FASOR)

Submitted by RDingledine on Fri, 10/13/2017 - 4:34pm

Tor is used daily by millions of users, including journalists, militaries and law enforcement, activists, companies, whistleblowers, and ordinary people, to protect their web browsing against surveillance. However, the internal architecture of Tor is very complicated. This complexity creates performance problems, and it makes security analysis difficult. Furthermore, Tor's encryption will be broken by future quantum computers.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Leveraging High-Density Internet Peering Hubs to Mitigate Large-Scale DDoS Attacks

Submitted by perdisci on Fri, 10/13/2017 - 2:31pm

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.

group_project

Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Algorithmic Framework for Anomaly Detection in Interdependent Networks

Submitted by Rebecca Wright on Fri, 10/13/2017 - 2:29pm

Modern critical infrastructure relies on successful interdependent function among many different types of networks. For example, the Internet depends on access to the power grid, which in turn depends on the power-grid communication network and the energy production network. For this reason, network science researchers have begun examining the robustness of critical infrastructure as a network of networks, or a multilayer network. Research in network anomaly detection systems has focused on single network structures (specifically, the Internet as a single network).