Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Ubiquitous computing environments will definitely change the way we go about our daily activities, as they will, more than ever before, facilitate our actions to be sensed, communicated, stored and searched electronically. The scale of the change should make every one of us care about the security and privacy problems created by these environments. Ignoring these problems would otherwise turn ubiquitous computing environment into an Orwellian society, where the norm is what Prof. Ron Rivest from MIT called the "reversal of default", where "What was once private is now public", and "what was once easily forgotten, is now stored forever". The research program proposed here would focus on developing a comprehensive framework of protocols and algorithms for protecting the security and privacy of the occupants of ubiquitous computing environments. The framework would address the problem of data protection at two levels: (1) at the network level, to ensure the availability of the sensing network, and to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the sensed data, and (2) at the user level, by developing dynamic control mechanisms that would allow the occupants of ubiquitous computing environments to control what information is collected about them, how it is processed, and under what circumstances it can be shared.