Develop System Design Methods

This research project studies security and privacy for wearable devices. Wearable computing is poised to become widely deployed throughout society. These devices offer many benefits to end users in terms of realtime access to information and the augmentation of human memory, but they are also likely to introduce new and complex privacy and security problems. People who use wearable devices need assurances that their privacy will be respected, and we also need ways to minimize the potential for wearable devices to intrude on the privacy of bystanders and others.

This frontier project tackles many of the fundamental research challenges necessary to provide trustworthy information systems for health and wellness, as sensitive information and health-related tasks are increasingly pushed into mobile devices and cloud-based services.

Individuals and organizations routinely trust third party providers to hold sensitive data, putting it at risk of exposure. While the data could be encrypted under a key that is kept secret from the provider, it rarely is, due to the inconvenience and increased cost of managing the cryptography. This project will develop technologies for working with encrypted data efficiently and conveniently. In particular, it will enable searching on encrypted data, which is prevented by currently deployed encryption, and running arbitrary programs efficiently on encrypted data.

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.

Compliance officers specify organizations' policies and procedures for mitigating risk to sensitive data. However, demands for employees' quick access to organizational data often limit which security technologies can be deployed. As a result, many organizations configure an open access environment in which authenticated employees can access any piece of data (e.g., a common practice across health care facilities).