TWC

The goal of the project is to provide a secure foundation for a transportation system that increasingly relies on the cooperation, connectedness, and automation of vehicles to achieve increases in safety, efficiency, and capacity. The financial losses attributable to congestion in America's transportation infrastructure are more than $1 trillion annually and the parallel loss of life in vehicle collisions is 40,000 deaths per year.

The security and integrity of elections is paramount in the furtherance of democracy. However, enhanced security often comes at the cost of making voting systems significantly more difficult for voters to use. With input from stakeholders in the voting process (most notably Travis County, Texas), we are constructing a prototype voting system and investigating how to design such a system so that it is significantly more secure than current solutions, without making it harder to participate in the election process.

Data structures have a prominent modern computational role, due to their wide applicability, such as in database querying, web searching, and social network analysis. This project focuses on the interplay of data structures with security protocols, examining two different paradigms: the security for data structures paradigm (SD) and the data structures for security paradigm (DS).

This research explores a new approach to securing systems that are based on crowd computations, where the operator polls the opinions of crowds--arbitrary users of the system--to provide a variety of recommendation services. Examples include services like Yelp, YouTube, Twitter, and TripAdvisor. However, today's services are known to suffer from multiple identity (Sybil) attacks, where an attacker creates many identities to subvert the system (e.g., make their business appear to be more popular on Yelp).

This research is developing methods that leverage a multitude of sensors embedded in hand-held and wearable devices (e.g., smart watches, smart glasses and brain-computer interfaces) for strong user authentication to smart phones. The current point-of-entry solutions, largely based on weak static credentials, such as passwords or PINs for authentication to smart phones are not sufficient because once such credentials are compromised (which is very likely given the many vulnerabilities of passwords), the attacker may gain unfettered access to the smart phone.