Human Aspects

This project for Wearable Authentication Solutions for Ubiquitous and Personal Touch-Enabled Devices (WASUP) studies and designs models and techniques to identify, authenticate, and audit touches on touch-sensing devices using a small wearable token. The token, such as a bracelet or ring, embeds a security code in the capacitive touch signature of a user, which is detected with the existing capacitive sensors used in many touch screens. This offers a number of distinct and desirable properties. First, the code is clearly associated with a touch, even if multiple potential users are nearby.

This research project studies security and privacy for wearable devices. Wearable computing is poised to become widely deployed throughout society. These devices offer many benefits to end users in terms of realtime access to information and the augmentation of human memory, but they are also likely to introduce new and complex privacy and security problems. People who use wearable devices need assurances that their privacy will be respected, and we also need ways to minimize the potential for wearable devices to intrude on the privacy of bystanders and others.

Most of the world's internet access occurs through mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. While these devices are convenient, they also enable crimes that intersect the physical world and cyberspace. For example, a thief who steals a smartphone can gain access to a person's sensitive email, or someone using a banking app on the train may reveal account numbers to someone looking over her shoulder. This research will study how, when, and where people use smartphones and the relationship between these usage patterns and the likelihood of being a victim of cybercrime.

Computers today are so complex and opaque that a user cannot possibly hope to know, let alone trust, everything occurring within the machine. While software security techniques help ensure the integrity of user computations, they are only as trustworthy as the underlying hardware. Even though many proposals provide some relief to the problem of hardware trust, the user must ultimately rely on the assurances of other parties. This work restores hardware trust through a simple, small, and slow pluggable hardware element.

This project studies Internet censorship using novel measurement techniques, ranging from low-level packet filtering on Internet Protocol (IP) networks to high-level censorship of social media content. Collectively these techniques can provide greater situational awareness of censorship dynamics. The project focuses on a suite of advanced inference techniques for when ?direct observation?