Transition to Practice

This capacity building project will create Secure Programming Clinic to enhance student learning and expertise in writing robust, secure software, analogous to a writing clinic in an English department or law school. It provides continual reinforcement of the mechanisms, methods, technologies, and need for programming with security and robustness considerations throughout a student's undergraduate coursework. The clinic would augment courses, not replace them or their content.

The use of "cloud technologies" presents a promising avenue for the requirements of big data analysis. Security concerns however represent a major impediment to the further adoption of clouds: through the sharing of cloud resources, an attack succeeding on one node can tamper with many applications sharing that node.

This project is developing the next generation of network measurement tools for penetration testers, digital forensics experts, and other cybersecurity professionals who sometimes need to know more about the Internet or a specific network. It is developing techniques based on TCP/IP side channel inferences, where it is possible to infer something about a remote machine's view of the network based on the use of shared, limited resources.

Semantic attacks are efforts by others to steal valuable information by imitating electronic communications from a trustworthy source. A common example of a semantic attack is phishing where a phisher sends unsolicited messages to potential targets. When a targeted individual responds, the phisher then steals valuable information from the individual. Semantic attacks flow through established channels of communication (e.g., email, social media) and are difficult to distinguish from legitimate messages.

Open-audit cryptographic voting protocols enable the verification of election outcomes, independent of whether election officials or polling machines behave honestly. Many open-audit voting systems have been prototyped and deployed. The City of Takoma Park, MD held its 2009 and 2011 city elections using voting system Scantegrity. Systems with similar properties are being proposed for use in Victoria, Australia (the Pret a Voter system) and Travis County, Texas (the STAR-Vote system).