Data science

For nearly 40 years, the United States has faced a critical problem: increasing demand for energy has outstripped the ability of the systems and markets that supply power. Today, a variety of promising new technologies offer a solution to this problem. Clean, renewable power generation, such as solar and wind are increasingly available. Hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles offer greater energy efficiency in transportation.

Growing energy demands and environmental concerns have significantly increased the interest of academia, industry, and governments in the development of a smart electric power grid. Security is one of the key aspects of power systems. The objective of this research is to advance methods of vulnerability analysis and to develop innovative responses to maintain the integrity of power grids under complex attacks (both cyber attacks and physical failures). This research will contribute to developing robust, secure, and reliable future smart grid systems.

The "Virtual Laboratory and Curriculum Development for Secure Mobile Computing" project at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) will develop a set of courses and a virtual laboratory in mobile system security with an emphasis on securing smart phones. The courses that will be developed will include topics such as Android taint analysis using existing tools or development of new tools, scalable Android security threat analysis on applications (apps), and smart phone forensics.

Malware (e.g., viruses, worms, and Trojans) is software that deliberately fulfills the harmful intent of an attacker. It has been used as a major weapon by the cyber-criminals to launch a wide range of attacks that cause serious damages and significant financial losses to many Internet users. To protect legitimate users from these attacks, the most significant line of defense against malware is anti-malware software products, which predominately use signature-based methods to recognize threats.

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), along with the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, are responsible for securing Internet transactions such as banking, email, and e-commerce; they provide users with the ability to verify with whom they are communicating online, and enable encryption of those communications. While the use of the PKI is mostly automated, there is a surprising amount of human intervention in management tasks that are crucial to its proper operation.