Understand and Measure Privacy

The Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) based security primitives typically suffer from area/power overhead, sensitivity to environmental fluctuations and limited randomness and entropy offered by Silicon substrate. Spintronic circuits can complement the existing CMOS based security and trust infrastructures. This project explores ways to uncover the security specific properties of the magnetic nanowire and capture them in detailed circuit model.

Youths of the digital age live parallel lives online and in the real world, frequently disclosing personal information to cyberfriends and strangers, regardless of race, class or gender. Race and gender do make a difference, however, when these online disclosures lead to acts of cyberaggression. The PIs' previous work revealed that some youths are resistant to cyberaggression and that there are differences in perceptions of cyberbullying among youths from different cultural and racial backgrounds.

Informally speaking, Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) allows two or more parties to jointly compute some function on their private inputs in a distributed fashion (i.e., without the involvement of a trusted third party) such that none of the parties learns anything beyond its dedicated output and what it can deduce from considering both this output and its own private input. Since its inception in 1982 by Yao, SMPC has advanced greatly and over the years a large body of work has been developed.

Technology advances have brought numerous benefits to people and society, but also heightened risks to privacy. This project will investigate mechanisms and build tools to help people make privacy-aware decisions in different online contexts. The outcomes will help people to better understand their own privacy preferences and behavior, and enable them to better manage their privacy on the Internet. The project will create designs that can be integrated into mobile app markets and web browsers. The results will also inform Internet standards and governmental policies on Internet privacy.

Understanding the computational hardness of securely realizing cryptographic primitives is a fundamental problem in cryptography. One such vital cryptographic primitive is oblivious transfer and understanding the essence of implementing it has significant consequences to cryptography, like bringing secure multi-party computation closer to reality. This research develops a new theory to explore this broad concept, namely the theory of computational correlations.