Division of Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS)

Given the diverse and complex nature of computer security, a natural response of the academic and industrial community has been to study how one can create technical solutions to the problem. Although the technical solutions to various problems can be quite effective, the underlying premise of many of the solutions is predicated upon an informed awareness of the user of the importance of avoiding risky behavior.

It is critical to protect the Internet from attacks such as denial of service, and attacks on inter-domain routing. Although several defenses have been proposed, actual deployments have been limited. A primary reason for this lack of deployment is that most defenses have not been validated under realistic conditions, or at sufficiently large scales. Many attacks also have second-order effects that are not well understood. This is because it is difficult to incorporate all the protocols involved at any reasonable scale in analytical, simulation, or emulation models or testbeds.

Access to many important datasets in health care, biomedical informatics, sociology, and homeland security is restricted by HIPAA regulations on the release of detailed "microdata", impeding basic research in fields dependent on such data, and the problem will only get worse as more medical data is collected. A primary focus of this project is to "unlock" such critical datasets by developing techniques and tools to anonymize very large databases. Such tools will facilitate the release of datasets to researchers, while insuring that the privacy of individuals is maintained.

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.