Cryptology and Rights Management

Controlling information from being read or altered by others, preserving marks of ownership and origin, and breaking the code of adversaries are all of interest in information security. CERIAS expertise and interest includes encryption, number theoretic foundations, cryptanalysis, optical encryption, watermarking (of images, audio, movies), research in natural language digital rights protection including natural language watermarking and tamperproofing, automated security (de)classification of documents, cryptographic protocols, cybercash, trusted voting and bidding protocols, and intellectual property laws.

Secure Supply-Chain Protocols

Principal Investigator: Mikhail Atallah; Leroy Schwarz; Vinayak Deshpande

One of the major sources of inefficiency in supply-chain management is information asymmetry; i.e., information that is available to one or more organizations in the chain (e.g., manufacturer, retailer) is not available to others. Information asymmetry is known to create inefficiencies in managing supply chains, among them under-investment in capacity, leading to shortages, misallocation of inventory and transportation, increased prices, and reduced customer service. It can also lead to increased use of premium shipping, increased penalties resulting from line shutdowns, and lost future business contracts. There are several causes of information asymmetry, among them fear that a powerful buyer or supplier will take advantage of private information, that information will leak to a competitor, etc.

The Secure Supply-Chain Collaboration (SSCC) protocols we propose will enable supply-chain partners to cooperatively achieve desired system-wide goals without revealing any private information, even though the jointly-computed decisions depend on the private information of all the parties..

This project will create new research tools in supply-chain management and foster the development of new techniques in computer science. SSCC also has the potential to profoundly impact supply-chain management practice; and, thereby, improve productivity and stimulate economic growth.

Improving the Privacy and Security of Online Survey Data Collection, Storage, and Processing

Principal Investigator: Mike Atallah;Juline Mills

This project involves the development of cryptographic protocols and techniques to enhance the security and privacy of the collection, storage, and processing of online survey data. Specifically, cryptographic protocols are designed for carrying out computations on online survey data in such a manner that only the approved output is revealed by the protocol, not the input data. The protocol therefore acts as a purpose-enforcement mechanism such that the data can be used only as authorized and can no longer be collected for one purpose and illicitly used for another. This approach has the benefit of protecting collected online survey data from hackers, spyware, misbehaving insiders, and accidental disclosure through the loss of a storage device. The security and purpose-enforcement in turn make it possible to potentially acquire higher quality responses to surveys on sensitive topics, a significant benefit in view of the increasing societal reliance on surveys from which important policy conclusions are often drawn in the health sciences, social and behavioral sciences, experimental economics, and other disciplines where the human subjects’ individual responses are to be considered sensitive and kept private. The cryptographic protocols are tested through the administration of an online survey on Internet addiction. Protocols for data analysis techniques are developed to aid in the analysis of the collected data. The students involved in this project acquire a unique combination of inter-disciplinary talents. The results of this work are disseminated through the project Web site: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/mja/secsurv/SecureSurv.html