CMU

Cyber security is a global phenomenon. For example, recent socially-engineered attacks that target CEOs of global corporations appear to be instigated by the Chinese group dubbed the "comment crew." In their 2011 survey Symantec found that the number one cyber risk business concern was external cyber-attacks, followed by concerns about both unintentional insider error (2^nd risk) and intentional insider error ( 3^rd risk).

Our ability to design appropriate information security mechanisms and sound security policies depends on our understanding of how end-users actually behave. To improve this understanding, we will establish a large panel of end-users whose complete online behavior will be captured, monitored, and analyzed over an extended period of time.

Compositional security is a recognized central scientific challenge for trustworthy computing. Contemporary systems are built up from smaller components. However, even if each component is secure in isolation, the composed system may not achieve the desired end-to-end security property: an adversary may exploit complex interactions between components to compromise security. Such attacks have shown up in the wild in many different settings, including web browsers and infrastructure, network protocols and infrastructure, and application and systems software.