Protect

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Small: Open-Audit Voting Systems---Protocol Models and Properties

Open-audit cryptographic voting protocols enable the verification of election outcomes, independent of whether election officials or polling machines behave honestly. Many open-audit voting systems have been prototyped and deployed. The City of Takoma Park, MD held its 2009 and 2011 city elections using voting system Scantegrity. Systems with similar properties are being proposed for use in Victoria, Australia (the Pret a Voter system) and Travis County, Texas (the STAR-Vote system).

group_project

Visible to the public CRII: SaTC: Design, Implementation, and Analysis of Quantum-Resistant Algorithms on Smart Handheld Embedded Devices

The prospect of quantum computers is a threat against the security of currently used public key cryptographic algorithms. It has been widely accepted that, both public key cryptosystems including RSA and ECC will be broken by quantum computers employing certain algorithms. Although large-scale quantum computers do not yet exist, but the goal is to develop quantum-resistant cryptosystems in anticipation of quantum computers as most of the public key cryptography that is used on the Internet today is based on algorithms that are vulnerable to quantum attacks.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Small: Collaborative: Scalable Techniques for Better Situational Awareness: Algorithmic Frameworks and Large-Scale Empirical Analyses

Attacks on computer networks are an all too familiar event, leaving operators with little choice but to deploy a myriad of monitoring devices to ensure dependable and stable service on the networks they operate. However, as networks grow bigger and faster, staying ahead of the constant deluge of attack traffic is becoming increasingly difficult. A case in point is the attacks on enterprise name servers that interact with the Domain Name System (DNS). These name servers are critical infrastructure, busily translating human readable domain names to IP addresses.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: STARSS: Combatting Integrated Circuit Counterfeiting Using Secure Chip Odometers

Electronics counterfeiting is a significant and growing problem for electronics manufacturers, system integrators, and end customers, with an estimated annual economic impact in billions of dollars. These counterfeit Integrated Circuits (ICs) can have degraded reliability, smaller operating ranges, or lower performance compared to the genuine article.

group_project

Visible to the public CAREER: Securing Sensory Side-Channels in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) integrate devices that can interact with each other and the physical world around them. With CPS applications, engineers monitor the structural health of highways and bridges, farmers check the health of their crops, and ecologists observe wildlife in their natural habitat.

group_project

Visible to the public  EAGER: Digital Interventions for Reducing Social Networking Risks in Adolescents

Adolescents are at higher risk of engaging in risky behaviors in online social networks. This project develops digital intervention solutions to motivate, educate, support and engender safe social networking behaviors among adolescents. It significantly extends the current understanding of adolescent motivations for engaging in risky online behaviors and the state-of-the-art solutions for reducing adolescent exposure to such behaviors.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Developer Crowdsourcing: Capturing, Understanding, and Addressing Security-related Blind Spots in APIs

Despite an emphasis the security community places on the importance of producing secure software, the number of new security vulnerabilities in software increases every year. This research is based on the assumption that software vulnerabilities are caused by misunderstandings, or lack of knowledge, called blind spots, which the developers experience while they are building systems. When building systems, developers often focus more on functional requirements than on non-functional ones, such as security.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Side Channels through Lower-Level Caches: Attacks, Defenses and Security Metrics

In cache-based side-channel attacks, an attacker with no special privileges or physical access can extract secrets from a victim process by observing its memory accesses through a shared cache. Such attacks have been demonstrated on a number of platforms, and represent a dangerous and open threat. This project explores side-channel attacks on the shared lower-level-caches (LLCs) in modern CPUs.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Security and Privacy for Wearable and Continuous Sensing Platforms

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.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC SBE: Medium: Context-Aware Harassment Detection on Social Media

As social media permeates our daily life, there has been a sharp rise in the use of social media to humiliate, bully, and threaten others, which has come with harmful consequences such as emotional distress, depression, and suicide. The October 2014 Pew Research survey shows that 73% of adult Internet users have observed online harassment and 40% have experienced it. The prevalence and serious consequences of online harassment present both social and technological challenges.