The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

Secure, Composable, & Scalable Framework for Trusted Collaborative Computing

Research Areas: Human Centric Security

Principal Investigator: Xukai Zou

Collaborative Computing (CC) is a critical application domain within the Internet environment. A few examples of CC are multi-party computation, collaborative defense, tele-medicine and collaborative decision making.  Participants in CC demand confidentiality, privacy, integrity, and controlled sharing of sensitive information. Also, CC environments involve many entities, which are dynamic, heterogeneous, distributed, and can be hostile. Currently, CC uses the Internet as the underlying infrastructure, which by design is not secure and suffers from incessant attacks ranging from eavesdropping to vulnerability exploitation. Hence, it is imperative for the success of CC to require a reliable and secure framework built on top of the Internet to remedy some of its limitations. CC, based on such an underlying framework, can be termed as Trusted Collaborative Computing (TCC). Thus, the long term objective of this research is to develop a framework that will enable TCC. This framework consists of: (1) (group-oriented) secure and anonymous communication, (2) finely-controlled data sharing and (3) secure, composable and scalable integration.  The framework will effectively address the underlying challenges of secure communication and guaranteed access, anonymity, composability, interoperability, and scalability.  

The core technique in the proposed TCC framework is Access Control Polynomial (ACP) which was just presented at and published in the proceedings of INFOCOM’08, one of the highest international conferences in the networking and security field.  The short term yet intensive summer work is to implement and evaluate such an innovative ACP mechanism and related security modules. This work will significantly help the accomplishment of the long term objective and secure the application for external funding.

Keywords: Collaborative Computing, collaborative defense, Trusted Collaborative Computing