Develop System Design Methods

This project addresses how semiconductor designers can verify the correctness of ICs that they source from possibly untrusted fabricators. Existing solutions to this problem are either based on legal and contractual obligations, or use post-fabrication IC testing, both of which are unsatisfactory or unsound. As a sound alternative, this project designs and fabricates verifiable hardware: ICs that provide proofs of their correctness for every input-output computation they perform in the field.

The design of social media interfaces greatly shapes how much, and when, people decide to reveal private information. For example, a designer can highlight a new system feature (e.g., your travel history displayed on a map) and show which friends are using this new addition. By making it seem as if sharing is the norm -- after all, your friends are doing it -- the designer signals to the end-user that he can and should participate and share information.

The objective of this project is to investigate a comprehensive image privacy recommendation system, called iPrivacy (image Privacy), which can efficiently and automatically generate proper privacy settings for newly shared photos that also considers consensus of multiple parties appearing in the same photo. Photo sharing has become very popular with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and other mobile devices.

Common smartphone authentication mechanisms such as PINs, graphical passwords, and fingerprint scans offer limited security. They are relatively easy to guess or spoof, and are ineffective when the smartphone is captured after the user has logged in. Multi-modal active authentication addresses these challenges by frequently and unobtrusively authenticating the user via behavioral biometric signals, such as touchscreen interaction, hand movements, gait, voice, and phone location.

Everyday web users have little guidance in handling the growing number of privacy issues they face when they go online. Many web sites - some legitimate, some less so - have behaviors many would consider unexpected or undesirable. These include popular and well-known web sites, as well as web sites that aim to dupe customers with "free" trials. These kinds of sites often detail their behaviors in privacy policies and terms of use pages, but these policies are rarely read, hard to understand, and sometimes intentionally obfuscated with legal jargon, small text, and pale fonts.