Mission

Current Research Topics

• Physical layer built-in of security communication system

  Wireless communication is widely used for critical information sharing and data transmission in both civilian and military communications. Security has become a great concern and an urgent issue. Development of novel wireless systems with built-in security is being viewed as a major approach in securing wireless networks. The goal of this research is to create virtual physical boundary for wireless networks analogous to its wired counterpart using cryptographic techniques so that the security for wireless networks can be treated the same way as wired networks.

• Reconciling anonymity with accountability in secure network communications

  While encryption may hide the contents being communicated, only anonymity can hide who is communicating. In cyberspace, communication privacy, as one of the cornerstones of information security, has been the design goals for many cryptosystems. It is made possible in practice by the techniques of modern cryptography which ensures that information is accessible only to those authorized people. However, the research on communication anonymity remains an open research area. The goal of this research is to develop theoretic foundation, building blocks and efficient techniques for provably secure anonymous network communications. We emphasize anonymity while ensuring accountability.

• Design of cryptographic algorithms and protocols for e-commence

  Public-key digital certificate has been widely used in public-key infrastructure (PKI) to provide user authentication and key agreement. However, the public-key digital certificate itself cannot be used directly to provide user authentication since a digital certificate can be easily recorded and played back once it has been revealed to a verifier. The goal of this research is to develop innovative and secure user authentication techniques similar to the current passport-then-face-matching based two-factor authentication. These designs can be used in online applications to enforce access security.

• Design of energy efficient and scalable secure protocol for wireless sensor networks

  Sensor networks are being widely used in many areas to handle sensitive information. Sensor nodes are often deployed in accessible areas that are vulnerable to physical attacks. The sensor nodes are very limited in their energy, computation, and communication capabilities. These new constraints pose new challenges on authentication, privacy, robustness to denial-of-service attacks, secure routing, and node capture. Our goal is to develop security services and protocols suitable for sensor applications from the initial development so that a strong and complete protection against illegal activities can be assured.

• Secure digital copyright protection and management

  In this project, we already developed several cryptographic secure digital watermarking techniques in both spatial and frequency domain. The schemes can be used to provide digital media copyright protection.