Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

In the context of computing and communication devices, platforms are laptops, personal computers (PCs), servers, mobile and smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. These are hardware devices, commonly equipped with one or more processors, multiple types of memories, and input-out interfaces. Operating systems and application programs are executed on these platforms to provide computing and/or communication capabilities in various forms. The increasing use and value of the information or data processed by or stored into today's computer and communication platforms has put the latter at the center of many security breaches. In a networked environment, an infected platform can quickly impact devices and systems across the network or a platform compromised through a back-door can be used by an attacker to mine for confidential information or lunch attacks on other platforms connected to the network. Existing solutions such as firewalls and on-device data encryption software typically protect the data as long as the device itself is not compromised, but do little to ensure the integrity of the platform. To this end, we propose to conduct research by jointly considering the integrity of platforms and the protection of data processed by or stored into them. Our work will include the development of efficient and unified crypto-engines, formulation of algorithms for underlying computations, and investigation of hash functions which are all crucial for a platform's integrity and its content protection.