Access control

Software is responsible for many critical government, business, and educational functions. This project aims to develop new methods for finding and repairing some of the most challenging, poorly understood security vulnerabilities in modern software that have the potential to jeopardize the security and reliability of the nation's cyber infrastructure.

Security policies often base access decisions on temporal context (e.g., time of day) and environmental context (e.g., geographic location). Access control policies for operating systems frequently consider execution context (e.g., user ID, program arguments). However, little has been done to incorporate user expectation context into security decision mechanisms. Text artifacts provide a source of user expectation context.

To address today's environment of constant security challenges and cyber-threats, the Hardware-Assisted Lightweight Capability Optimization (HALCYON) research explores novel techniques to make the performance of more secure system designs acceptable to users. Conventional system designs have achieved acceptable performance, but have evolved from hardware and software designs that carry forward compromises in security that made sense in the past, but not with modern hardware resources in today's security climate.

Smartphones and tablets are being used widely, and with such a pervasive use, protecting mobile systems is of critical importance. One of the unique features in mobile systems is that many applications incorporate third-party components, such as advertisement, social-network APIs, and the WebView component (that runs third-party JavaScript code).

This project will help address the shortage of highly-skilled Cybersecurity professionals by bringing research results on pervasive and mobile computing security into education and by integrating them into existing Cybersecurity curricula. Although the research community is making progress towards effective solutions in mitigating security and privacy threats in pervasive computing, it still needs to find its way to university courses across the nation, especially, in the undergraduate curriculum.