CORE

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Situation-Aware Identification and Rectification of Regrettable Privacy Decisions

Submitted by Heng Xu on Tue, 03/19/2019 - 2:47pm

People today are faced with many privacy decisions in their daily interactions with mobile devices. In the past decade, researchers have studied the design of many tools and mechanisms, such as privacy nudges, that aim to help individuals make better privacy decisions. But just like decision support tools in other domains, these tools cannot make users perfect decision-makers. Users still make mistakes and regret their privacy decisions later. This project casts a fresh perspective on Privacy-by-Redesign by helping users revisit and rectify past privacy decisions that they may regret.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Understanding and Discovering Illicit Online Business Through Automatic Analysis of Online Text Traces

Submitted by Xiaojing Liao on Tue, 03/19/2019 - 2:43pm

Unlawful online business often leaves behind human-readable text traces for interacting with its targets (e.g., defrauding victims, advertising illicit products to intended customers) or coordinating among the criminals involved. Such text content is valuable for detecting various types of cybercrimes and understanding how they happen, the perpetrator's strategies, capabilities and infrastructures and even the ecosystem of the underground business.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Defending against Compromise and Manipulation of Mobile Communities

Submitted by Ben Zhao on Mon, 03/18/2019 - 11:55am

Many of today's mobile services build mobile communities of users who share their valuable experiences and data. Examples include traffic incidents (Waze), restaurant reviews (Yelp, FourSquare), anonymous social networks (Whisper, Yik Yak), and even dating (Tinder, Bumble). Unfortunately, new threats can compromise and manipulate these communities, using lightweight software to mimic mobile devices. The resesarchers have shown how attackers can eavesdrop on mobile network traffic, learn their patterns, and write software to emulate mobile devices running the application.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Exploiting Physical Properties in Wireless Networks for Implicit Authentication

Submitted by Yingying Chen on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 11:12am

The rapid development of information technology not only leads to great convenience in our daily lives, but also raises significant concerns in the field of security and privacy. Particularly, the authentication process, which serves as the first line of information security by verifying the identity of a person or device, has become increasingly critical. An unauthorized access could result in detrimental impact on both corporation and individual in both secrecy loss and privacy leakage.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Toward Usable and Ubiquitous Trust Initialization and Secure Networking in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Submitted by Shucheng Yu on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 10:17am

With billions of smart wireless devices being ubiquitously deployed, safeguarding their networking from cyber attacks has become a challenge. Not only can the devices deployed in a network can be heterogeneous in terms of available computing resources and interfaces, but ordinary users typically have limited technical expertise to perform complicated security configurations. What's more, trust among the devices is often lacking because of the different vendors or distribution channels they have traversed.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: NSF-BSF: CORE: Small: Increasing Users' Cyber-Security Compliance by Reducing Present Bias

Submitted by Serge Egelman on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 10:12am

Despite advances in computer security, there are still situations in which users must manually perform computer security tasks (e.g., rebooting to apply updates). Although many people recognize that these tasks are important, they still procrastinate. Procrastination is often caused by the failure to properly weigh the long-term security benefits against short-term costs and the annoyance of interrupting the primary task.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: RUI: Differentially Private Hypothesis Testing

Submitted by Adam Groce on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 10:07am

In today's world, private companies, hospitals, governments, and other entities frequently maintain large databases that would be hugely valuable to researchers in many fields. However, privacy concerns prevent these databases from being fully utilized. Differential privacy defines conditions under which information about these databases can be released while provably protecting the privacy of the individuals whose data they contain. This project develops differentially private hypothesis tests.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Secure Computation on Large Data

Submitted by Stanislaw Jarecki on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 10:01am

This project focuses on secure computation protocols that can efficiently compute on large data. Secure computation is a fundamental and very general notion in cryptography that captures privacy-preserving computation of any algorithm on data which originates from multiple sources and should be kept private except for what is revealed by the computation output.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Machine Learning for Effective Fuzz Testing

Submitted by Koushik Sen on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 9:24am

In recent years, fuzz testing has evolved as one of the most effective testing techniques for finding security vulnerabilities and correctness bugs in real-world software systems. It has been used successfully by major software companies for security testing and quality assurance. State-of-the-art fuzz testing tools have found numerous security vulnerabilities and bugs in widely used software such as Web browsers, network tools, image processors, popular system libraries, C compilers, and interpreters.

group_project

Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: URadio: Towards Secure Smart Home IoT Communication Using Hybrid Ultrasonic-RF Radio

Submitted by Qiben Yan on Thu, 03/14/2019 - 9:21am

Recent years have seen the explosion of smart home Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and platforms, underscoring the need to address security and privacy of smart home communications. The demand for IoT devices (e.g., smart speakers, locks, and activity trackers) is occurring while radio spectrum, a necessary ingredient for wireless service, becomes increasingly scarce. As a result, multiple wireless technologies coexist and compete for spectrum resources, resulting in degraded spectrum efficiency and security.