Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)

The BIRT methodology will aid biometric system designers in making effective refinements in their systems. The measurement of biological characteristics (biometrics) such as fingerprints and facial images provides a means of identification that neither needs to be carried nor remembered. Evaluation of biometrics has traditionally been focused on the ability of biometric systems to identify members from a population, e.g., for purposes of authentication.

Only two number-theoretic assumptions --- hardness of factoring and of computing discrete logarithms --- underlie essentially all public-key cryptosystems in widespread use today. For lower-level primitives such as hash functions, random number generators, and stream ciphers, the situation is even worse: existing provably-secure constructions are too inefficient to compete with practical alternatives such as SHA-1 or AES, and so the primitives in use today have no rigorous justification for their security.

Society is dependent on many engineered systems whose increasing complexity and inter-connectedness have, in turn, increased their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In many of these systems, protecting the execution of their computations is as crucial as ensuring the security of their data. This research investigates how to maintain survivable operation of such systems, even in the face o finvasive attacks where computations are intentionally subverted to interfere with other computations' execution constraints.

Computer security is a critical issue that affects our everyday life. For this reason, most colleges and other educational institutions are devoting an increasing amount of resources to develop courses and curricula that involve security training. Typical courses include cryptography, general computer security, network security, and specialized topics, such as security of wireless networks and web security.

The Internet has become a part of our everyday lives. We use it to conduct much of our business, government, and social interactions. However, the scale and heterogeneity of the Internet have far surpassed anyone's expectations, and the Internet is responding by showing signs of strain. Security was not a major goal of the original design of Internet protocols, and it is now far too easy for malicious agents to engage in disruptive activities. The need to manage the network was not in mind from the beginning, making it difficult for network administrators.