Adapt

The objective of this project is to strengthen the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a ubiquitous core Internet protocol, under emerging threat models to make it robust and secure enough to serve the needs of 'smart' technologies in communications, automobiles, medical devices, and other devices that touch our lives every day. It is terrifying to imagine that a smart car could fail to report an accident automatically due to a denial of service attack on its TCP connections, or a smart medical device could fail to report a patient's change in condition.

This project aims at developing efficient methods for protecting the privacy of computations on outsourced data in distributed settings. The project addresses the design of an outsourced storage framework where the access pattern observed by the storage server gives no information about the actual data accessed by the client and cannot be correlated with external events. For example, the server cannot determine whether a certain item was previously accessed by the client or whether a certain algorithm is being executed.

This project studies the security of representative personalized services, such as search engines, news aggregators, and on-line targeted advertising, and identifies vulnerabilities in service components that can be exploited by pollution attacks to deliver contents intended by attackers.

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.