Scientific Foundations

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Visible to the public  SBE: Option: Small: Safety for the Ages: Generational Differences in Motivations to Use Security Protections in an Online Banking Context

How does the average user cope with the threats they encounter while engaged in the most sensitive of all online activities, online banking? Online Safety for the Ages (OSA) examines generational differences in motivations to use risky online services and self-protective measures in the context of online banking. An influx of older adults attracted to the Internet by social media but at times unfamiliar with dealing with the hazards of online life, as well as younger users who are sometimes oblivious to those dangers, pose distinct challenges to the preservation of online safety.

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Visible to the public SaTC: STARSS: Design of Secure and Anti-Counterfeit Integrated Circuits

Hardware security, whether for attack or defense, differs from software, network, and data security in that attackers may find ways to physically tamper with devices without leaving a trace, and mislead the user to believe that the hardware is authentic and trustworthy. Furthermore, the advent of new attack modes, illegal recycling, and hard-to-detect Trojans make hardware protection an increasingly challenging task. Design of secure hardware integrated circuits requires novel approaches for authentication that are ideally based on multiple layers of protection.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Secure and Resilient Vehicular Platooning

The goal of the project is to provide a secure foundation for a transportation system that increasingly relies on the cooperation, connectedness, and automation of vehicles to achieve increases in safety, efficiency, and capacity. The financial losses attributable to congestion in America's transportation infrastructure are more than $1 trillion annually and the parallel loss of life in vehicle collisions is 40,000 deaths per year.

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Visible to the public CAREER: EASE: Enhancing the Security of Pervasive Wireless Networks by Exploiting Location

Wireless systems have become an inseparable part of our social fabric, which allow users to move around and access the services from different locations while on the move. However, wireless security is often cited as a major technical barrier that must be overcome before widespread adoption of mobile services can occur. Traditional approaches have focused on addressing security threats on a case-by-case basis in an ad-hoc manner as new and specialized threats are uncovered.

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Visible to the public  TWC: TTP Option: Medium: Voting Systems Architectures for Security and Usability

The security and integrity of elections is paramount in the furtherance of democracy. However, enhanced security often comes at the cost of making voting systems significantly more difficult for voters to use. With input from stakeholders in the voting process (most notably Travis County, Texas), we are constructing a prototype voting system and investigating how to design such a system so that it is significantly more secure than current solutions, without making it harder to participate in the election process.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Practical Security Protocols via Advanced Data Structures

Data structures have a prominent modern computational role, due to their wide applicability, such as in database querying, web searching, and social network analysis. This project focuses on the interplay of data structures with security protocols, examining two different paradigms: the security for data structures paradigm (SD) and the data structures for security paradigm (DS).

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Towards Robust Crowd Computations

This research explores a new approach to securing systems that are based on crowd computations, where the operator polls the opinions of crowds--arbitrary users of the system--to provide a variety of recommendation services. Examples include services like Yelp, YouTube, Twitter, and TripAdvisor. However, today's services are known to suffer from multiple identity (Sybil) attacks, where an attacker creates many identities to subvert the system (e.g., make their business appear to be more popular on Yelp).

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Visible to the public EAGER: Effective Detection of Vulnerabilities and Linguistic Stratification in Open Source Software

Software vulnerabilities are weaknesses in the code that may be exploited by cybercriminals to harm a system. They often do not hinder a program's functionality, and are thus difficult to detect. This project focuses on developing methods to identify such "weak spots" in a program, where vulnerabilities are more likely to occur.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Toward Automated Integration of Moving Target Defense Techniques

Moving Target defense (MTD) is a new Cybersecurity paradigm for deterring and disturbing attacks proactively in order to counter the ?asymmetry? phenomena in cyber warfare. A number of moving target techniques have been recently proposed to inverse this asymmetry by randomizing systems? attributes (e.g., configuration) and exhibiting non-determinism to attackers. However, due to potential inter-dependency between various MTD mechanisms, an ad hoc combination of MTD techniques can cause profoundly detrimental effect on security, performance and the operational integrity of the system.