Develop System Design Methods

Public, online harassment takes many forms, but at its core are posts that are offensive, threatening, and intimidating. It is not an isolated problem. The Pew Research Center found 73% of people had witnessed harassment online, and a full 40% of people had experienced harassment directly. This research develops a method for analyzing the things people post online, and automatically detecting which posts fall into the category of severe public online harassment -- messages posted simply to disrupt, offend, or threaten others.

This project is developing new foundational cryptographic techniques for outsourcing data and computations on it, which fully preserve data privacy. The focus is on real-world settings involving multiple users where privacy with respect to all other users is required, as well as privacy from the service provider. The project will aim to minimize the interaction between users in the system, making the computational complexity for each client independent of the total number of users.

This research focuses on understanding the digital security and privacy needs of journalists and their sources to evaluate and design communication technologies that better support the fundamental operations of a globally free and unfettered press. Journalists -- along with their organizations and sources -- are known to be high-risk targets for cyberattack. This community can serve as a privacy and security bellwether, motivated to use new technologies, but requiring flexibility and ease-of-use. Many existing secure tools are too cumbersome for journalists to use on a regular basis.

In order to establish a secure communication channel, each communicating party needs some method to authenticate the other, lest it unwittingly establish a channel with the adversary instead. Current techniques for authentication often rely on passwords and/or the public-key infrastructure (PKI). Both of these methods have considerable drawbacks since passwords are frequently breached, and PKI relies on central authorities which have proven to be less than reliable. Thus there is a need to use other sources of information for the communicating parties to authenticate each other.

Concern about the security and reliability of our electronic systems and infrastructure is at an all-time high. Economic factors dictate that the design, manufacturing, testing, and deployment of silicon chips are spread across many companies and countries with different and often conflicting goals and interests. In modern complex digital designs, behaviors at a good fraction of observable output signals for many operational cycles are unspecified and vulnerable to malicious modifications, known as Hardware Trojans.