Understand and Measure Privacy

Increasingly medical devices are dependent on software and the wireless channel for their operations, which also pose new vulnerabilities to their safe, dependable, and trustworthy operations. Medical devices such as implantable insulin pumps, which are in wide use today, continuously monitor and manage a patient's diabetes without the need for frequent daily patient interventions. These devices, not originally designed against cyber security threats, must now mitigate these threats.

The project aims at quantifying a general network's inner potential for supporting various forms of security by achieving secret common randomness between pairs or groups of its nodes. Statistical and computational secrecy measures are being considered against a general passive adversary. Common-randomness-achieving protocols are classified into two groups: culture-building and crowd-shielding. The former achieves common randomness between nodes situated in close proximity of each other, from correlated observations of specific (natural or induced) network phenomena.

Interoperable, reconfigurable systems of medical devices are the future of medical technology. They will improve care outcomes by catching common mistakes, reduce clinician cognitive workload by suppressing false alarms, and streamline and simplify continued care, especially when patients move between different medical facilities. As the penetration of "smart" networked medical technology increases, we will see increased problems with cybersecurity of such systems.

This project focuses on tackling the security and privacy of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by integrating the theory and best practices from the information security community as well as practical approaches from the control theory community. The first part of the project focuses on security and protection of cyber-physical critical infrastructures such as the power grid, water distribution networks, and transportation networks against computer attacks in order to prevent disruptions that may cause loss of service, infrastructure damage or even loss of life.

The ability to communicate and readily access information helps make possible positive social and political change. The Internet's effects on developing nations' educational, economic, and governmental institutions have been well explored by social scientists and technical experts. However, in unfortunately many instances, undemocratic governments monitor and censor Internet communication to attempt to control their populations.