ITR: Mechanisms for Securing Emerging Applications

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

As computers become pervasive in the home and community, new applications will emerge that will make daily living easier by automating or assisting in a variety of human activities. Such applications will be information rich and they will create and manipulate sensitive information about the activities of their users, and the environment in which they live and work. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, an information rich "Aware Home'' has been built to explore many such applications. Clearly, it is important that such applications be secured if they are to be deployed successfully. This project will undertake a range of research activities to secure future applications. These include new security policies for such applications, and intuitive and flexible access control models. A variety of automatic user identification techniques will also be investigated to authenticate sources of requests without requiring burdensome participation from the users making the requests. New notions of integrity for information accessed from outside sources will be developed. The authorization, authentication and integrity mechanisms will be used to build security services for emerging applications. The use of formal models will be explored to study important properties of the new security policies and access control models.