EAGER

This research is aimed at preventing harm from phishing attacks. Phishing attacks have been on the rise in the last few years with nearly 450,000 attacks and record estimated losses of over USD $5.9 billion just in the year 2013 alone. These attacks attempt to acquire personal information, such as username and passwords, through fraudulent emails. Phishing emails are becoming more targeted, using personal information about their intended victims, in an attempt to seem like authentic emails and improve the response rate to the attacks.

This research project will investigate and develop new mathematical tools in public-key cryptography. Such tools have been introduced in recent years as suitable for implementation on low-cost platforms with constrained computational resources; it is expected that such platforms will become more and prevalent as consumer devices become "smart" and connect to large networks with the emergence of the "Internet of Things." Public-key cryptography is used by each person hundreds and perhaps thousands of times daily, as it is the main security used in cellular, ATM, and other computer networks.

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).

Trusted hardware is essential to achieving a secure and trustworthy cyberspace. However, this security foundation is not free of threats. Specifically, an adversary involved in Integrated Circuit (IC) development and supply may launch a number of attacks such as intellectual property theft, design tamper, counterfeiting and overproduction. The Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative has identified this supply chain risk management problem as a top national priority.

Anything that causes the vote tally to differ from the intent of the voters is a threat to election integrity. While most threats to election integrity have concerned security, there is another critical threat to election integrity: usability. When voters are unable to successfully communicate their intent due to poor ballot design, this threatens the integrity of the election, no matter what the level of security is.