Research Infrastructure

Cryptography is an essential and widespread tool for providing information security. Traditional cryptographic models assume only black-box, or input/output access to devices, thereby limiting the class of attacks. In practice, an attacker may obtain non-black-box access to a device and attack a particular algorithm or specific implementation such as through timing or fault injection attacks. Exploiting non-black-box access has been a remarkably effective technique for compromising cryptosystems.

Robust cybersecurity information sharing infrastructure is required to protect the firms from future cyber attacks which might be difficult to achieve via individual effort. The United States federal government clearly encourage the firms to share their discoveries on cybersecurity breach and patch related information with other federal and private firms for strengthening the nation's security infrastructure.

As passive tagging technologies like RFID become more economical and ubiquitous, it can be envisioned that in the future, millions of sensors integrated with these tags could become an integral part of the next generation of smart infrastructure and the overall concept of internet-of-things. As a result, securing these passive assets against data theft and counterfeiting would become a priority, reinforcing the importance of the proposed dynamic authentication techniques.

Support for research on distributed data sets is challenged by stakeholder requirements limiting sharing. Researchers need early stage access to determine whether data sets are likely to contain the data they need. The Broker Leads project is developing privacy-enhancing technologies adapted to this discovery phase of data-driven research. Its approach is inspired by health information exchanges that are based on a broker system where data are held by healthcare providers and collected in distributed queries managed by the broker.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising new technology that enables an untrusted party to efficiently compute directly on ciphertexts. For instance, with FHE a cloud server without access to the user's encrypted content can still provide text search services. An efficient FHE scheme would significantly improve the security of sensitive user data stored and processed on cloud servers. Significant progress has been made in bringing FHE proposals closer to practice.