Understand and Measure Privacy

The goal of the Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project is to develop methods for building information systems with meaningful multi-layered security guarantees. The modular approach of MACS focuses on systems that are built from smaller and separable functional components, where the security of each component is asserted individually, and where the security of the system as a whole can be derived from the security of its components. The project concentrates on building outsourced, cloud-based information services with client-centric security guarantees.

Current cloud based systems enable distributed access to both information and computational resources. In this setting, it is imperative to have secure communication, and powerful and expensive cryptographic techniques have been proposed to address this issue. A severely limiting factor, however, is that these methods for securely accessing or processing data between participating parties can result in communication overheads when processing large amounts of data.

A key characteristic of cyberspace is the collection of large amounts of data, and people's privacy becomes vulnerable given the hyper-connectivity of cyberspace and the ease of accessing data. This project aims to enhance the safety and trustworthiness of cyberspace by designing choice architecture interventions informed by the neural processes underlying privacy to help people make better decisions about their privacy in cyberspace.

The project will develop a case method capstone course for a new multidisciplinary Master's degree program in Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida (USF). It extends a project that focused on developing a capstone course for an undergraduate program employing the case method pedagogy. That study demonstrated the feasibility of building a course entirely around discussions of local case studies and demonstrated positive learning outcomes using a variety of instruments.

Our lives are surrounded by a constant web of data, picked up by a global network of unseen programs that gather, coalesce, combine, and merge every scrap of data they can acquire. These programs and companies operate out of public view, collecting and exchanging data for profit without clear public knowledge. This is a complex ecosystem, the original collectors of data are likely unaware of eventual uses, users of data may be unaware of the original source.