Scientific Foundations

Many compelling applications involve computations that require sensitive data from two or more individuals. For example, as the cost of personal genome sequencing rapidly plummets many genetics applications will soon be within reach of individuals such as comparing one?s genome with the genomes of different groups of participants in a study to determine which treatment is likely to be most effective. Such comparisons could have tremendous value, but are currently infeasible because of the privacy concerns both for the individual and study participants.

When data is outsourced at a cloud storage provider, data owners lose control over the integrity of their data and must trust the storage provider unconditionally. Coupled with numerous data loss incidents, this prevents organizations from assessing the risk posed by outsourcing data to untrusted clouds, making cloud storage unsuitable for applications that require long-term security and reliability guarantees. This project establishes a practical remote data checking (RDC) framework as a mechanism to provide long-term integrity and reliability for remotely stored data.

Mobile browsers are beginning to serve as critical enablers of modern computing. With a combination of rich features that rival their desktop counterparts and strong security mechanisms such as TLS/SSL, these mobile browsers are becoming the basis of many other mobile apps. Unfortunately, the security guarantees provided by mobile browsers and the risks associated with today?s mobile web have not been evaluated in great detail.

The project develops new technologies for continual, web-scale measurement and rapid defenses against emerging threats to web privacy and security arising from third-party tracking. It draws from the fields of web security, systems, measurement, statistics, and machine learning. The outputs of this project will enable website administrators to find and fix a large class of privacy and security problems. They will help improve existing browser privacy tools.

Attacks on software applications such as email readers and web browsers are common. These attacks can cause damages ranging from application malfunction, loss of private data, to a complete takeover of users' computers. One effective strategy for limiting the damage is to adopt the principle of least privilege in application design: the application is split into several protection domains and each domain is given only the necessary privileges to perform its task.