Social, behavioral and economic science

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Visible to the public SBE TTP: Medium: Securing Cyber Space: Understanding the Cyber Attackers and Attacks via Social Media Analytics

As society becomes more dependent on cyber infrastructure, the security of networks and information technologies has become a growing concern. Individuals, businesses, and governmental organizations are now common victims of cyber-attacks that seek to steal private data, gain remote control over remote systems, and cause harm to networks and systems through other malicious means. Additionally, critical infrastructures such as smart power grids and communication networks are facing an increasing number of cyber-based threats.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Understanding the Strategic Values of Privacy Practices in Organizations

As companies collect consumer data in increasingly larger quantity and mine the data more deeply, trade-offs arise with respect to companies' practices about information privacy. A company may choose practices that augment targeted advertisements or services. However, the financial rewards associated with privacy practices are highly uncertain, since they are affected by a company's competition with rivals.

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Visible to the public EDU: Development and Analysis of a Cybersecurity Education Game

The project involves the design and development of pedagogical games to introduce cybersecurity and cyber safety concepts to students in grades K-6. It will engage students with activities demonstrating the relevance of cybersecurity to the world around them; challenge students with creative puzzle-solving exercises; and will analyze the effectiveness of age-appropriate cybersecurity games to introduce cybersecurity knowledge. A major aspect of this project is the dissemination of cybersecurity principles to elementary school students.

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Visible to the public EAGER: A Mathematical Model of Privacy Decisions: A Behavioral Economic Perspective

When making decisions about information privacy, people do not always act rationally according to their best interests. It is thus important to understand why people express concerns about privacy, but often act contrary to their stated intentions.

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: Medium: Collaborative: A Socio-Technical Approach to Privacy in a Camera-Rich World

Cameras are now pervasive on consumer devices, including smartphones, laptops, tablets, and new wearable devices like Google Glass and the Narrative Clip lifelogging camera.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Small: Automating Attack Strategy Recognition to Enhance Cyber Threat Prediction

Network attacks are increasingly complex and fast-evolving. A single attack may use multiple reconnaissance, exploit, and obfuscation techniques. This project investigates how to extract critical attack attributes, synthesize novel attack sequences, and reveal potential threats to critical assets in a timely manner. The project uses machine learning techniques to simultaneously identify new attack types and observed events that could identify those attacks.

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Visible to the public  TWC: Small: Collaborative: Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service: Analyses and Defenses

Living in an age when services are often rated, people are increasingly depending on reputation of sellers or products/apps when making purchases online. This puts pressure on people to gain and maintain a high reputation by offering reliable and high-quality services and/or products, which benefits the society at large. Unfortunately, due to extremely high competition in e-commerce or app stores, recently reputation manipulation related services have quickly developed into a sizable business, which is termed Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service (REaaS).

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Security and Privacy for Wearable and Continuous Sensing Platforms

This research project studies security and privacy for wearable devices. Wearable computing is poised to become widely deployed throughout society. These devices offer many benefits to end users in terms of realtime access to information and the augmentation of human memory, but they are also likely to introduce new and complex privacy and security problems. People who use wearable devices need assurances that their privacy will be respected, and we also need ways to minimize the potential for wearable devices to intrude on the privacy of bystanders and others.

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Visible to the public TWC: Large: Collaborative: Living in the Internet of Things

More and more objects used in daily life have Internet connectivity, creating an "Internet of Things" (IoT). Computer security and privacy for an IoT ecosystem are fundamentally important because security breaches can cause real and significant harm to people, their homes, and their community.

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Visible to the public SBE TWC: Small: Collaborative: Pocket Security - Smartphone Cybercrime in the Wild

Most of the world's internet access occurs through mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. While these devices are convenient, they also enable crimes that intersect the physical world and cyberspace. For example, a thief who steals a smartphone can gain access to a person's sensitive email, or someone using a banking app on the train may reveal account numbers to someone looking over her shoulder. This research will study how, when, and where people use smartphones and the relationship between these usage patterns and the likelihood of being a victim of cybercrime.