Privacy, applied

The U.S. power grid is being replaced with a smart grid, a complex network of intelligent electronic devices, distributed generators, and dispersed loads, which requires communication networks for management and coordination. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) networks are one part of the smart grid to provide two-way communications between smart meters at the consumers' side and the utility companies. AMI networks allow utilities to collect power consumption data at high frequency rates.

The era of personal genomics, where genetic information is ubiquitously available for research, clinical practice or personal curiosity, is quickly approaching. At the same time, there is a growing concern of genetic privacy and the existing educational resources are focused mostly on legal, regulatory or ethical issues in personal genomics.

There are at least two key features of the move to cloud computing that introduce the opportunity for significant leaps forward in computer security for tenant services. First, a compute cloud provides a common software, hardware and management basis for rolling out cross-cutting services en masse that have resisted incremental deployment in a one-service-at-a-time fashion. Second, compute clouds offer providers a broad view of activity across an unprecedented diversity of tenant services.

Access to publicly available information can be disrupted by various techniques, and alternative disruptive techniques continue to be developed. Understanding these alternative disruption techniques and how they affect network anonymity, privacy, and performance is paramount not only to the successful design of future technologies, but also to the security of existing networks and systems.

The security architecture of consumer operating systems is currently undergoing a fundamental change. In platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows 8, each application is a separate security principal that can own data. While this distinction is a vast improvement over traditional user-focused security architectures, sharing data between applications results in an unexpected loss of control of that data, potentially exposing security and privacy sensitive information.