CORE

Online reputation systems are ubiquitous for customers to evaluate businesses, products, people, and organizations based on reviews from the crowd. For example, Yelp and TripAdvisor rank restaurants and hotels based on user reviews, and RateMDs allows patients to review doctors and hospitals. These systems can however be leveraged by spammers to mislead and manipulate the inexperienced customers with fake but well-disguised reviews (spams). To comprehensively protect customers and honest businesses, advanced spam detection techniques have been deployed.

The power grid is a highly complex control system and one of the most impressive engineering feats of the modern era. Nearly every facet of modern society critically relies on the proper operation of the power grid such that long or even short interruptions can impose significant economic and social hardship on society. The current power grid is undergoing a transformation to a Smart Grid, that seeks to monitor and track diagnostic and operational information so as to enable a more efficient and resilient system.

Mobile computing devices typically use encryption to protect sensitive information. However, traditional encryption systems used in mobile devices cannot defend against an active attacker who can force the mobile device owner to disclose the key used for decrypting the sensitive information. This is particularly of concern to dissident users who are targets of nation states.

Advertising now funds most of the popular web sites and internet services: companies often provide their services for free, in exchange for collecting data from their users as they interact with the service. In recent years, the scale and resolution of user data that platforms collect has led to a dramatic increase in the variety of targeting, reporting, measurement, and tracking mechanisms that platforms offer to advertisers.

Developments in public-key encryption (PKE) and identity-based encryption (IBE) have revolutionized the field of cryptography and secure communication in general. PKE allowed remote parties to establish secure channels in front of eavesdropping adversaries, and led to public-key directories storing parties' public-keys. The stronger primitive of IBE eliminated the need for a large public-key directory, though this comes at the cost of trusting a central private-key generation authority.