Protect

Anything that causes the vote tally to differ from the intent of the voters is a threat to election integrity. While most threats to election integrity have concerned security, there is another critical threat to election integrity: usability. When voters are unable to successfully communicate their intent due to poor ballot design, this threatens the integrity of the election, no matter what the level of security is.

TECH MeD (Transdisciplinary Education for Critical Hacks of Medical Devices) seeks to engage a broad audience about the cybersecurity implications of remotely accessible, implantable medical devices. The project will educate undergraduate and graduate-level students from various disciplines, healthcare professionals, patients, and the general public about the ethical, legal, social, and technical implications of these remotely accessible devices.

While smart phones provide an excellent way for communication, entertaining and education, they also raise many privacy and security concerns. Children are facing the risks of being exposed to inappropriate content due to mis-rated Apps. Both Android and iOS apps come with maturity ratings that examine the existence and intensity of mature themes within each app. However, each mobile platform adopts its own rating policy and rating strategy which creates inconsistency and inaccurate ratings. The maturity ratings for Android apps are purely a result of app developers' self-report.

Cryptography is essential to ensure confidentiality and integrity of information. Due to their practicality, symmetric algorithms where the same secret key is used by the sender and the recipient underlie most practical deployments of cryptographic techniques. However, also as a result of this, symmetric cryptography suffers from an inherent tension between real world efficiency demands and provable security guarantees. This project investigates new technical advances aimed at narrowing the gap between provable security and the practical demands of symmetric cryptography.

Semiconductor chip fabrication is being increasingly outsourced to off-shore foundries. Outsourced fabrication reduces cost by leveraging economies-of-scale and ensures access to the most advanced manufacturing technology, but comes at the expense of trust. How can the chip designer trust that the off-shore (untrusted) foundry does not pirate its intellectual property (IP), or maliciously modify the integrated circuit (IC) by inserting a hardware Trojan in the chip? This project develops transformative new solutions for trustworthy chip fabrication at off-shore foundries.