ISG

Privacy protection challenges arising from location-based services (LBS) are critical to users as well as service providers. This project concentrates on designing and evaluating privacy protection techniques in LBS. The important departure of this project from the existing research is in its emphasis of the role of request contexts. A context refers to the external information/knowledge that the attacker may use, together with the requests themselves, to gain user private information.

Society is dependent on many engineered systems whose increasing complexity and inter-connectedness have, in turn, increased their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In many of these systems, protecting the execution of their computations is as crucial as ensuring the security of their data. This research investigates how to maintain survivable operation of such systems, even in the face o finvasive attacks where computations are intentionally subverted to interfere with other computations' execution constraints.

The Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA, formerly called LLVA forlow-level virtual architecture) project is developing a novel framework to improve operating system security and reliability. The two broad goals of the project are (a) to develop a compiler-enforced virtual machine that is safe, low-level, efficient, and capable of hosting a standard C/C++-based operating system and all its applications; and (b) to investigate how this organization can improve overall system security and provide new security capabilities.

Without their realizing it, end-users have been turned into authors of access-control policies. Everywhere from Google to Facebook to Microsoft HealthVault and beyond, these policies are usually hidden behind simple user interfaces, but ultimately the users are responsible for setting and then taking responsibility for the consequences of these policies. Indeed, the apparent simplicity of the interfaces sometimes belie the significance of the outcomes.

The goal of this research is to solve some important problems in nnnntorus-based, pairing-based, multilinear, and elliptic curve and abelian variety cryptography. Elliptic curve cryptography helps to secure the Internet and is used by the U.S. and other governments and institutions to provide secure communication. Abelian variety cryptography includes elliptic and hyperelliptic curve cryptography, scales well to high security levels, and is especially advantageous in constrained environments.