Foster Multidisciplinary Approach

Researchers have found that over 90% of successful cyber attacks exploit vulnerabilities that could have been fixed with available patches. Vulnerabilities can be weak passwords or software with bugs on personal computers, mobile devices, or printers. Yet, decision-making about manually applying patches is difficult. First, a substantial fraction of vulnerabilities are fixed each month by automatic patching. Second, applying patches can have side-effects, making software unusable. Third, organizations have limited abilities to estimate the profit from applying patches.

Household Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are intended to collect information in the home and to communicate with each other, to create powerful new applications that support our day-to-day activities. Existing research suggests that users have a difficult time selecting their privacy settings on such devices. The goal of this project is to investigate how, why and when privacy decisions of household IoT users are suboptimal, and to use the insights from this research to create and test a simple single user interface that integrates privacy settings across all devices within a household.

This frontier project tackles many of the fundamental research challenges necessary to provide trustworthy information systems for health and wellness, as sensitive information and health-related tasks are increasingly pushed into mobile devices and cloud-based services.

Contemporary encryption schemes are almost exclusively distribution-agnostic. Their security properties are independent of the statistical characteristics of plaintexts, and the output of these schemes are ciphertexts that are uniformly distributed bit strings, irrespective of use case. While conceptually simple, such encryption schemes fail to meet basic, real-world requirements and have left longstanding functional gaps in key security applications.

On-line sharing of images has become a key enabler of users' connectivity. Various types of images are shared through social media to represent users' interests and experiences. While extremely convenient and socially valuable, this level of pervasiveness introduces acute privacy concerns. First, once shared images may go anywhere, as copying / resharing images is straightforward. Second, the information disclosed through an image reveals aspects of users' private lives, affecting both the owner and other subjects in the image.