Authentication

The goal of the project is to provide a secure foundation for a transportation system that increasingly relies on the cooperation, connectedness, and automation of vehicles to achieve increases in safety, efficiency, and capacity. The financial losses attributable to congestion in America's transportation infrastructure are more than $1 trillion annually and the parallel loss of life in vehicle collisions is 40,000 deaths per year.

The goal of this project is to investigate the reliability, robustness, and computationally efficiency of digital audio forensic methods under various adversarial conditions, e.g., lossy compression attack. We aim to identify and develop mathematical tools for modeling and characterizing of microphone nonlinearities (fingerprints), statistical methods for acoustic environment estimation, and system identification based framework for linking an acquisition device to the audio recording.

The availability of ideal randomness is a common assumption used not only in cryptography, but in many other areas of computer science, and engineering in general. Unfortunately, in many situations this assumption is highly unrealistic, and cryptographic systems have to be built based on imperfect sources of randomness. Motivated by these considerations, this project will investigate the validity of this assumption and consider several important scenarios where secure cryptographic systems must be built based on various kinds of imperfect randomness.

Mobile authentication is necessary for preventing unauthorized access to mobile devices with increasingly more private information. Despite significant progress in mobile authentication for sighted people, secure and usable mobile authentication for people with visual impairment remains largely under-explored. This project is to develop, prototype and evaluate novel secure and usable mobile authentication techniques for people with visual impairment.

We are evaluating a new model of password security in which users place pieces on a game board (e.g., chess pieces on a chessboard). The fact that existing systems are either memorable or secure, but not both, motivated our approach. We are testing 14-15 year old high school students, college students 18-30, and older adults 60-80, and we are conducting two types of experiments. First, we are measuring all groups' memories for passwords of two and four game pieces (after a 20-minute filled delay).