Systems

Plausibly deniable encryption is the ability to hide that given data is on a device, whether the ability exists to decrypt it, or even that the data exists. Plausible deniability is a powerful property to protect data on devices the user has lost physical control over, such as protecting consumers from accidental mass disclosures of private data through misplaced devices. This issue is of particular concern for anyone who travels internationally with sensitive data, including human rights workers, diplomats, military personnel, or even business travelers.

The proliferation and increasing sophistication of censorship warrants continuing efforts to develop tools to evade it. Yet, designing effective mechanisms for censorship resistance ultimately depends on accurate models of the capabilities of censors, as well as how those capabilities will likely evolve. In contrast to more established disciplines within security, censorship resistance is relatively nascent, not yet having solid foundations for understanding censor capabilities or evaluating the effectiveness of evasion technologies.

This proposal provides funding for the third GREPSEC: Underrepresented Groups in Security Research workshop, which will held in May 2017, in San Jose CA. This day-and-a-half-long workshop intended for women and underrepresented minorities in computer security and privacy, will be co-located with the IEEE Computer Society's Security and Privacy Symposium, the premier conference in security.

Cybersecurity is one of the most strategically important areas in computer science, and also one of the most difficult disciplines to teach effectively. Historically, hands-on cyber security exercises helped students reinforce basic concepts, but most of them focused on user level attacks and defenses. Since OS kernels provide the foundations to the applications, any compromise to OS kernels will lead to an entirely untrusted computing. Therefore, it is imperative to teach students the practice of kernel level attacks and defenses.

Modern critical infrastructure relies on successful interdependent function among many different types of networks. For example, the Internet depends on access to the power grid, which in turn depends on the power-grid communication network and the energy production network. For this reason, network science researchers have begun examining the robustness of critical infrastructure as a network of networks, or a multilayer network. Research in network anomaly detection systems has focused on single network structures (specifically, the Internet as a single network).