Develop Approaches

This project addresses several key emerging security challenges that arise due to the wildly successful large-scale adoption of mobile devices with diverse network capabilities. The novel approach focuses on to understanding how various information that are legitimately and willingly provided by smartphone users due to the requested permissions of downloaded applications can be potentially abused. The second research focus is to identify improvements in the design of cellular network middlebox (e.g., firewall) policies by detailed exposure and explicitly defining the key requirements.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has quickly moved from concept to reality, with estimates that the number of deployed IoT devices will rise to 25 billion in 2020. However, studies show that many IoT devices have serious security vulnerabilities. Moreover, the limitations of IoT devices and scale of networks of IoT devices often make traditional IT security approaches impractical.

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.

Side-channel attacks (SCA) have been a realistic threat to various cryptographic implementations that do not feature dedicated protection. While many effective countermeasures have been found and applied manually, they are application-specific and labor intensive. In addition, security evaluation tends to be incomplete, with no guarantee that all the vulnerabilities in the target system have been identified and addressed by such manual countermeasures.

The problem of ensuring that computer hardware is not surreptitiously malicious is a growing concern. The case of random number generators (RNGs) is particularly important because random numbers are foundational to information security. All current solutions in practice require trusting the hardware, and are therefore vulnerable to hardware attacks. This project explores a quantum-based solution to hardware security by designing and implementing a new class of RNGs that can prove their own integrity to the user.