Software

Youths of the digital age live parallel lives online and in the real world, frequently disclosing personal information to cyberfriends and strangers, regardless of race, class or gender. Race and gender do make a difference, however, when these online disclosures lead to acts of cyberaggression. The PIs' previous work revealed that some youths are resistant to cyberaggression and that there are differences in perceptions of cyberbullying among youths from different cultural and racial backgrounds.

Two methods used for vulnerability discovery in network protocols are testing and a semi-automated technique called model checking. Testing and model checking implementations of network protocols is a tedious and time-consuming task, where significant manual effort goes into designing test cases and protocol property specifications. Both approaches require detailed and structured information about the tested protocols, in the form of messages, state machine, invariants, etc. Most of the time this information is derived manually by people with different levels of expertise.

Many challenging real world problems, e.g., voting and blind auction, require computation over sensitive data supplied by multiple mutually-distrustful entities. Elegant cryptographic theories have been developed to solve these problems without relying on a mutually-trusted third party. Practitioners also built prototypes capable of securely computing set intersection, AES encryption, Hamming distance, etc. However, many other applications, such as data mining and running universal machines, are far more complex than what can be supported by the state-of-the-art techniques.

The growing hardware security community is faced with an immediate need to develop effective tools and benchmarks. The purpose of this project is to lead a community-wide movement toward stronger assurances in our integrated circuits, computational platforms, and electronics supply chain.

The Center for Encrypted Functionalities (CORE) tackles the deep and far-reaching problem of general-purpose "program obfuscation," which aims to enhance cybersecurity by making an arbitrary computer program unintelligible while preserving its functionality.