The following is a brief summary of recent activities by the University of MD Lablet as reported in the SoS Quarterly Summary Report.

Fundamental Research

• UMD has presented studies centered on understanding human factors, behavior, and influence in security. A protocol for remote electronic voting, with the human voter serving as a main participant of the protocol, has been explored. The fundamental notion of trust has been explored to help develop models, which aid in understanding the costs and benefits of collaboration as a variation of trust. This particular study directly addresses challenges of policy-governed secure collaboration. Researchers at UMD have taken culture and workplace dynamics into consideration, in a study which attempts to discover what encourages or discourages privacy and security. An empirical study highlighting graphical passwords, with a view to understand user perceptions of security in visual systems, has been conducted to improve system designs that take human perception of security into consideration. On the offensive side, researchers studied honeypots deployed at UMD to better understand the effects of different system-level aspects of intruder behavior. The disparity in security patch deployment was addressed, in a study which aims to influence the development of quantifiable metrics for assessing the security of systems.

Community Interaction

• UMD enjoyed a “kick-off” presentation featuring members from each task in the UMD Lablet, encouraging discussion and feedback on their various works. Inter-lablet communication and cooperation is underway to help characterize and explain the five hard problems currently being studied. The 2015 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on the Principles of Programming Language, held in Mumbai India, will feature UMD’s proposed tutorial on software contracts.

Educational

• In an education pursuit, several Lablet members will be teaching Fall computer security courses, topics which include integration of empirical and behavioral studies.

For more information about UMD Lablet activities go to University of Maryland

Note:

Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to SoS.Project (at) SecureDataBank.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.