Scientific Foundations

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.

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.

Telephony is the dominant means of digital communication across the globe. With more than six billion users worldwide, these systems represent the only communications infrastructure available to the majority of people on the planet. Authentication has traditionally been the most central security issue for telephony providers. Tied directly to the billing process, authentication ensures that providers are able to correctly charge specific parties for their network usage.

The pace of digitization and interconnection of hospital systems has increased tremendously as recent healthcare legislation has encouraged the interoperation of medical record systems. In addition to ordinary business operations data, hospital enterprise networks now carry patient record data and life-critical data streams from therapy systems (e.g., nuclear medicine, dialysis clinical systems). Unfortunately, the security implications of interconnecting such life-critical systems has been largely unstudied.

Whether it is on their smartphones, in their browsers or on social networks, people are confronted with an increasingly unmanageable number of privacy settings. What is needed is a new, more scalable paradigm that empowers them to regain control over the collection and use of their data. This is particularly the case for mobile apps people download on their smartphones. These apps have been shown to collect and share a wide variety of sensitive data, with users unable to keep up.