Scientific Foundations

The widespread development of communication networks has profoundly transformed our society, resulting in a significant increase in productivity and efficiency. However, the benefits of this increased connectivity are today also counterbalanced by the ease with which malicious individuals can interfere or tamper with sensitive data and information. The past decade has thus witnessed a growing concern for the issues of privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of communications.

The problem of securely outsourcing data and computation has received widespread attention due to the rise of cloud computing: a paradigm where businesses lease computing resources from a service rather than maintain their own computing infrastructure. These scenarios introduce new security problems: in particular how do we trust the integrity of data and computation that are not under our own control. This project deals with these problems by considering methods, adapted from the world of economics, to incentivize parties to behave correctly during the execution of a computation.

Computer systems security is an arms race between defenders and attackers that has mainly been confined to software technologies. Increases in the complexity of hardware and the rising number of transistors per chip have created opportunities for hardware-based security threats. Among the most pernicious are malicious hardware footholds inserted at design time, which an attacker can use as the basis of a computer system attack. This project explores of the feasibility of foothold attacks and a fundamental design-time methodology for defending against them.

The ability to generate random numbers -- to flip coins -- is crucial for many computing tasks, from Monte Carlo simulation to secure communications. The theory of building such subsystems to generate random numbers is well understood, but the gap between theory and practice is surprisingly wide. As built today, these subsystems are opaque and fragile. Flaws in these subsystems can compromise the security of millions of Internet hosts.

Natural language privacy policies have become a de facto standard to address expectations of notice and choice on the Web. Yet, there is ample evidence that users generally do not read these policies and that those who occasionally do struggle to understand what they read. Initiatives aimed at addressing this problem through the development of machine implementable standards or other solutions that require website operators to adhere to more stringent requirements have run into obstacles, with many website operators showing reluctance to commit to anything more than what they currently do.