Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)

This project develops new ways to defend critical infrastructure systems, such as factory control networks, medical devices, or power plants, against attacks. These systems directly interact with the physical world, so a successful attack can have serious consequences: for instance, a compromised chemical plant could have severe environmental consequences, and a compromised medical device could result in injury or death. Contemporary security mechanisms, however, can be inadequate for at two reasons.

Grassroots groups seek to protect their digital security but also to be transparent and open, and to affirm their legitimacy and authority. This research will examine how organizations and groups shape the ways they balance what may be conflicting needs to avoid censure and harassment while being open enough to encourage trust and participation. The research will examine the role of organizational structure and digital security practices, and to uncover processes, practices, or behaviors that increase or reduce security threats to online groups.

This project explores a new, integrated approach to securing decentralized applications. The key problem is that decentralized applications are executed by mutually distrusting entities in a decentralized distributed system (such as a blockchain), where the entities must collaborate to execute the desired computation, despite not trusting each other. Building decentralized applications is difficult and error prone because the low-level security mechanisms are too removed from the high-level policies, thus it is difficult for programmers to correctly implement the policies.

The exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities in popular software is among the leading causes of system compromise and malware infection. While there are several reasons behind this proliferation of exploitable bugs, the reliance on unsafe programming languages such as C and C++ and the complexity of modern software play a major role.

Quantum computers, which harness the peculiarities of quantum physics to solve hard computational problems, are poised to deliver significant and far-reaching impacts to cryptography and privacy. Significant progress is being made in developing these devices, indicating that quantum computing will likely be viable in the next couple decades. Once viable, quantum computers will open up new attack vectors that will render many current cryptosystems insecure.