Scientific Foundations

Growing energy demands and environmental concerns have significantly increased the interest of academia, industry, and governments in the development of a smart electric power grid. Security is one of the key aspects of power systems. The objective of this research is to advance methods of vulnerability analysis and to develop innovative responses to maintain the integrity of power grids under complex attacks (both cyber attacks and physical failures). This research will contribute to developing robust, secure, and reliable future smart grid systems.

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.

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.

Operators of networks and distributed systems often find themselves needing to answer a diagnostic or forensic question -- some part of the system is found to be in an unexpected state, and the operators must decide whether the state is legitimate or a symptom of a clandestine attack. In such cases, it would be useful to ask the system for an 'explanation' of the observed state. In the absence of attacks, emerging network provenance techniques can construct such explanations by constructing a chain of events that links the observed state to its root causes.

This project addresses how semiconductor designers can verify the correctness of ICs that they source from possibly untrusted fabricators. Existing solutions to this problem are either based on legal and contractual obligations, or use post-fabrication IC testing, both of which are unsatisfactory or unsound. As a sound alternative, this project designs and fabricates verifiable hardware: ICs that provide proofs of their correctness for every input-output computation they perform in the field.