Cybersecurity Workforce

The goal of this project is to investigate the reliability, robustness, and computationally efficiency of digital audio forensic methods under various adversarial conditions, e.g., lossy compression attack. We aim to identify and develop mathematical tools for modeling and characterizing of microphone nonlinearities (fingerprints), statistical methods for acoustic environment estimation, and system identification based framework for linking an acquisition device to the audio recording.

The availability of ideal randomness is a common assumption used not only in cryptography, but in many other areas of computer science, and engineering in general. Unfortunately, in many situations this assumption is highly unrealistic, and cryptographic systems have to be built based on imperfect sources of randomness. Motivated by these considerations, this project will investigate the validity of this assumption and consider several important scenarios where secure cryptographic systems must be built based on various kinds of imperfect randomness.

This project aims to address privacy concerns of smartphone users. In particular, it investigates how the usages of the smartphone applications (apps) may reshape users' privacy perceptions and what is the implication of such reshaping. There has been recent work that investigates privacy leakage and potential defense mechanisms. However, so far there is only limited understanding on the consequences of such privacy losses, especially when large amount of privacy information leaked from smartphone users across many apps.

To address today's environment of constant security challenges and cyber-threats, the Hardware-Assisted Lightweight Capability Optimization (HALCYON) research explores novel techniques to make the performance of more secure system designs acceptable to users. Conventional system designs have achieved acceptable performance, but have evolved from hardware and software designs that carry forward compromises in security that made sense in the past, but not with modern hardware resources in today's security climate.

The objective of this project is to create a virtual laboratory for hardware security lab exercises. The lab exercises are based on a hands-on 'hardware hacking' course where students can work on specialized hardware to try out various hardware-based attacks. These lab activities include modules on side channel power analysis attacks, electromagnetic keyboard logging, counterfeit integrated circuit detection, and hardware Trojan attacks.