EAGER

This project is focused on a potentially transformational research study involving the simultaneous investigation of usability and security/privacy technologies for location-based geo-social applications, with the objective of studying the usability, feasibility, and scalability of privacy-preserving and secure location-aware geo-social networking platforms for mobile devices. The approach is based on a belief that usability and security/privacy are addressed properly and most effectively from the start.

This proposal represents an opportunity to seed a highly innovative interdisciplinary research project that has the potential for significant practical and theoretical impact for the management of information security ? an area which is receiving more and more public attention. During the past decade, research in information security has expanded from a purely technical focus to a more general technology-economic focus.

To stop anonymous tools designed for free speech from being abused by criminals, this project investigates practical solutions to trace back criminals while support free speech for benign users, by exploiting two unique perspectives. First, it utilizes the resource advantages of law enforcement to explore the limitations of anonymous tools. As criminals operated from remote locations usually do not have resources to build large-scale systems, they have to rely on existing anonymous tools with third-party resources to hide their traces.

The growth of the Internet means everyone from system administrators to casual users are regularly confronted with making decisions on how to share data. Research suggests that even experts struggle to make these decisions accurately using current access-control mechanisms. As users start to share information across social and professional applications, usable access-control mechanisms that help prevent such semantic errors are all the more urgent.

The security of the national computing infrastructure is critical for consumer confidence, protection of privacy, protection of valuable intellectual property, and even national security. Logic-based approaches to security have been gaining popularity, in part because they provide a precise way to describe and reason about the kinds of complexity found in real systems. Perhaps even more importantly, automated reasoning techniques can be used to assist users in navigating this complexity. Despite the promise of automated reasoning, its use in practical applications is still limited.