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This project supports a team of researchers, including experts in moral philosophy and transportation engineering, who plan to address ethical issues that arise in the development of computer algorithms for autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. The project will address concerns over the expression of ethical values in self-driving vehicle when (for example) the vehicle detects an imminent and unavoidable crash and must select among navigation options, such as colliding with a crowded bus or with a lone motorcyclist.

Voting is the most fundamental act of participation in our democracy, yet voting technology has suffered diverse failures and crises. Voting is a remarkably hard, interdisciplinary problem, with seemingly conflicting goals of verifying ballots while maintaining secret ballots to safeguard against bribery and coercion. This project is producing innovative and fundamental computer security technologies supporting remote and kiosk voting scenarios, i.e. high assurance applications on un-trusted hardware/software.

The rapid advancement of techniques for secure computation on protected data offers a major incentive for development of tools for general-purpose secure computation that protects data privacy, as opposed to computation of specialized tasks. The recent emergence of cloud computing and the need to protect privacy of sensitive data used in outsourced computation serves as another major motivation for this work. With this in mind, this project targets at developing a compiler suitable for privacy-preserving execution of any functionality specified by a user program.

Recent trends in computing have prompted users and organizations to store an increasingly large amount of sensitive data at third party locations in the cloud outside of their direct control. In order to protect this data, it needs to be encrypted. However, traditional encryption systems lack the expressiveness needed for most applications involving big and complex data.

The Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) based security primitives typically suffer from area/power overhead, sensitivity to environmental fluctuations and limited randomness and entropy offered by Silicon substrate. Spintronic circuits can complement the existing CMOS based security and trust infrastructures. This project explores ways to uncover the security specific properties of the magnetic nanowire and capture them in detailed circuit model.