Systems

Heavy vehicles, such as trucks and buses, are part of the US critical infrastructure and carry out a significant portion of commercial and private business operations. Little effort has been invested in cyber security for these assets. If an adversary gains access to the vehicle's Controller Area Network (CAN), attacks can be launched that can affect critical vehicle electronic components. Traditionally, physical access to a heavy vehicle was required to access the CAN.

Computer software play a ubiquitous role in the modern way of life. Attacks against vulnerable software lead to compromise and loss of financial and personal information. While the application stores and the software manufacturers may strive to provide vulnerability-free software, the onus to defend against attacks and ensure integrity of one?s personal information and resources is on the end-user.

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 National Science Foundation funds over seven billion dollars of research annually, nearly all of which relies heavily on information technology. The digital data produced and computing systems used by that research are subject to the same risks as other data and computing systems on the Internet. Appropriate cybersecurity is necessary both to make today's scientific discoveries possible and to ensure that the science is trustworthy. However, NSF science is often necessarily performed in open, collaborative environments that span organizational and national boundaries.

Interoperable, reconfigurable systems of medical devices are the future of medical technology. They will improve care outcomes by catching common mistakes, reduce clinician cognitive workload by suppressing false alarms, and streamline and simplify continued care, especially when patients move between different medical facilities. As the penetration of "smart" networked medical technology increases, we will see increased problems with cybersecurity of such systems.