Research

TRUST research is addressing technical, operational, privacy, and policy challenges via interdisciplinary projects that combine fundamental science and applied research to deliver breakthrough advances in trustworthy systems in the following "grand challenge" areas:

FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURES

TRUST researchers aim to develop central science and engineering principles to ensure the long-term security, reliability, and ubiquitous usage of the nation's financial infrastructure. This comprises financial service enterprises, online retail businesses and advertisers, and customers linked together in a trustworthy environment that supports commercial transactions in a secure and privacy-perserving way.
Learn More >>

HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURES

Healthcare has been characterized as a "trillion dollar cottage industry" dependent upon paper records and fragmented, error-prone approaches to service delivery. Recently, however, the healthcare industry is changing, including the dramatic increase in the amount of information available for making health decisions, the rapidly growing use of the Internet, genome research that opens up opportunity to provide personalized healthcare, and a better understanding of medical errors caused by failures in information management. Technology offers unique opportunities for both improving the delivery of care in medical facilities and shifting healthcare from traditional clinical settings to patient/home-centered settings. TRUST researchers are tackling fundamental issues affecting the design of trusted Health Information Systems with technical solutions and design methodologies to solve problems such as the implementation of privacy requirements and the guarantee of safe operation of Health Information Systems to better ensure the adoption of new, transformational technologies.
Learn More >>

PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURES

TRUST researchers are addressing next generation Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and networked embedded control systems that govern critical physical infrastructures (e.g., power grid, natural gas and water distribution, transportation) and futuristic infrastructures such as smart grid and intelligent buildings and structures (e.g., active-bridges whose structural integrity depends on dynamic control or actuators).
Learn More >>

SCIENCE OF SECURITY

TRUST researchers are developing a science base for security, with hopes to ultimately leverage these views in revising course content and embodying this theory in tools for system developers. Much computer security today is primarily reactive, deploying defenses for known attacks; it needs to become proactive, which is possible only if we can build systems in a principled way. A science of security would provide, for example, mental tools for understanding (a) how to expose trust assumptions intrinsic in a system design and how different defense mechanisms relocate trust assumptions in a system; (b) how to characterize security properties in a way that gives insight into enforcement mechanisms and verification approaches; (c) what classes of security properties can various classes of defenses support, and (d) what classes of attacks can various classes of defenses resist. The expectation is that this science can become a basis for an engineering discipline.
Learn More >>