Research Infrastructure

Third-party hardware Intellectual Property (IP), written as code in a Hardware Description Language (HDL), is extensively used in modern integrated circuits. Contemporary electronics typically include 75% of third party hardware IP and only 25% in-house design to provide customization or a profit-making edge. Such extensive use of third-party hardware IP in both commercial and military applications raises security and trustworthiness concerns, especially in today's globalized market.

This project establishes a multimedia-based virtual classroom with a virtual lab teaching assistant for the education of cyber physical system (CPS) security. Such a virtual classroom helps college students in resource-limited rural areas to learn the latest CPS security knowledge via an on-line peer-to-peer learning environment with other students from larger schools.

The use of cloud computing has revolutionized the way in which cyber infrastructure is used and managed. The on-demand access to seemingly infinite resources provided by this paradigm has enabled technical innovation and indeed innovative business models and practices. This rosy picture is threatened, however, by increasing nefarious interest in cloud platforms. Specifically, the shared tenant, shared resource nature of cloud platforms, as well as the natural accrual of valuable information in cloud platforms, provide both the incentive and the possible means of exploitation.

For nearly 40 years, the United States has faced a critical problem: increasing demand for energy has outstripped the ability of the systems and markets that supply power. Today, a variety of promising new technologies offer a solution to this problem. Clean, renewable power generation, such as solar and wind are increasingly available. Hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles offer greater energy efficiency in transportation.

The goal of our work is to (a) capture people's expectations and surprises in using mobile apps in a scalable manner, and to (b) summarize these perceptions in a simple format to help people make better trust decisions. Our main idea is analyzing privacy in the form of people's expectations about what an app will and won't do, focusing on where an app breaks people's expectations. We are building an App Scanner that combines automated scanning techniques with crowdsourcing.