EAGER

Security is very difficult to use, and staying safe online is a growing challenge for everyone. It is especially devastating to inexperienced computer users, who may not spot risk indicators and may misinterpret currently implemented textual explanations and visual feedback of risk. This work explores, evaluates, and compares the effectiveness of several online safety education modules for users of various skill levels and the importance and effectiveness of visual feedback when encountering security threats.

The Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human computer interaction, security, and privacy. The program features technical papers, workshops and tutorials, a poster session, panels and invited talks, and discussion sessions. The ninth SOUPS will be held July 24-26, 2013 at Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK. The funds support travel grants for American students to attend the conference. SOUPS is the top conference devoted to usable privacy and security.

his work seeks to understand the extent and impact of personalization algorithms in popular on-line forums. In particular, the PI is studying web search engines, social networking sites, and recommendation services like Pintrest, Yelp and Reddit. While it is well known that each of these classes of information sources perform extensive personalization, there has not been a careful analysis on the impact of their efforts on what users see. This effort is working to answer a number of fundamental questions: How different are the experiences of distinct users?

A new, emergent cybersecurity frontier is information manipulation, whereby adversaries may attempt to distort information to influence opinion, thought, or action. Information manipulation can take many shapes and forms, from blatant attacks such as search-poisoning, misinformation such as bogus on-line reviews, to subtle distortion such as personalized search and biased news. Left unchecked, information manipulation can harm our economy, culture, and democracy. Past research efforts have been ad-hoc and focused on specific kinds of information manipulation.

This project explores process composition tools as applied to elections, concentrating particularly on mail-in and Internet voting. This includes exploration of how to compose systems from pre-analyzed process components, how to analyze the vulnerability of these systems to attacks, and how to guarantee that important security properties are ensured for the resulting composed system.