Too Much Information: Helping People Keep Their Private Data to Themselves

Dr. Landon Cox, Duke University
May 12, 2008

Abstract

Access control is a multi-faceted area that has been advanced by a wide range of computer science research communities including programming languages, human-computer interaction, computer architecture, and operating systems. In general, this body of work has either sought to improve the expressiveness of access control logic or introduce novel mechanisms for enforcing policies. Each approach relies on a human operator or programmer to manually specify access control policies which are then enforced by a trusted reference monitor. Unfortunately, policy specification is often an error-prone process and can lead to damaging breaches of confidentiality due to access control misconfiguration. The work presented in this talk seeks to 1) develop heuristics and models of proper access control enforcement, and 2) design and implement system monitoring mechanisms capable of automatically identifying suspicious sharing patterns. These activities target both ubiquitous Internet systems such as the web and email as well as emerging mobile systems such as mobile social networks and participatory sensing.

Bio

Landon Cox is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and a recent recipient of an NSF CAREER award. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2005. Landon's current research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, and mobile computing.