Human Aspects

A key characteristic of cyberspace is the collection of large amounts of data, and people's privacy becomes vulnerable given the hyper-connectivity of cyberspace and the ease of accessing data. This project aims to enhance the safety and trustworthiness of cyberspace by designing choice architecture interventions informed by the neural processes underlying privacy to help people make better decisions about their privacy in cyberspace.

The proposed project will develop Visualization and Analysis of C Code Security (VACCS) tool to assist students with learning secure code programming. The proposal addresses the critical issue of learning secure coding through the development of a system for analyzing and visualizing C code and associated learning materials. VACCS will utilize static and dynamic program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities and warn programmers about the potential errors in their code.

The cyber security of advanced manufacturing systems (AMS) has raised significant interest amongst both the general public and researchers. However, corresponding education programs fall behind in many aspects. Limited curriculum or hands-on learning resources are available for security education in AMS, especially exercises that cover the complete manufacturing cycle. This project will try to bridge the gap by developing an experiment platform dedicated to security education for AMS, and designing a suite of course modules and hands-on projects upon it.

Risk communication is an important part of many cyber security mechanisms. Android's current risk communication mechanism is based on security warnings and has been demonstrated to be ineffective because users become habituated to ignore such warnings and tend to consent to all prompts. This multi-disciplinary research project aims at developing holistic solutions to usable risk communication and control for the Android platform.

The main objective of this two-year project is to develop, implement, and study an intervention that increases cybersecurity awareness and proficiency among high school teachers and exposes high school girls to cybersecurity activities and careers. This objective is spurred by the growing need for cybersecurity professionals coupled with the under-representation of women in this field. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 18% of cybersecurity specialists are women.