Project Grant 1619454

The Tor Project Inc. will receive $1.2 million under a Project Grant award from the Department of State Bureau of Democracy Human Rights and Labor. The funding is part of the International Programs to Support Democracy, Human Rights and Labor program (CFDA 19.345) and will support ensuring human rights defenders, journalists, activists and other marginalized people have a safe, secure experience on the Tor network. Specifically, the Tor Project will reduce malicious relay activity and improve...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Federal Grant Award (CFDA 47.070), totaling $456,905, aims to advance the theory and practice of anonymous communications by systematically exploring and leveraging radio frequency (RF) fingerprints inherent in communication devices. The key research thrusts include: (1) developing statistical models and identification methods for RF fingerprints, (2) achieving untraceable communications by...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) provides $174,998 to The Trustees of the Stevens Institute of Technology to investigate timing side channels in adaptive neural networks. The project aims to: (1) define a threat model for exploiting timing channels to gain sensitive user information, (2) develop a machine learning-based pipeline to utilize these timing channels, (3) create an...

This three-year, $300,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program aims to develop scalable defenses against Sybil attacks in dynamic computer networks. The University of New Mexico will collaborate with cybersecurity practitioners and academia through two research workshops to design new defenses where the resource burning cost to legitimate participants grows slowly as a function of the adversary's resources and rate of...

This $600,000 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University to develop an anonymous mobile access architecture for next-generation mobile networks. The research aims to enable anti-tracking capabilities while using mobile networks by integrating decentralized identifiers and anonymous verifiable credential schemes into the 5G authentication and key agreement protocol. Key tasks include developing a secure callee discovery...

This three-year, $999,860 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Brown University on privacy-preserving authentication using mercurial signatures. Mercurial signatures offer an intuitive approach to anonymous credentials that does not require expertise in cryptographic commitments or zero-knowledge proofs. They allow for privacy-preserving certification chains and delegatable anonymous credentials with strong composition guarantees. This work aims to address gaps in...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Computing and Communication Foundations provides $527,295 to the University of Maryland, College Park to develop passive measurement tools for detecting internet censorship and traffic tampering. The award, which runs from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2025, aims to create a collection of measurement tools that can rapidly detect newly censored content and capture what users are actively experiencing, unlike...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program, with a total funding of $122,767, supports a research project by the University of California, Berkeley aimed at hardening off-the-shelf software against side channel attacks. The project consists of three main tasks: (1) reverse engineering hardware structures to determine potential attack vectors, (2) designing software transformations to protect against side...

The National Science Foundation awarded $749,186 under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program to the University of Colorado Boulder for the 5G Hidden Operations Through Securing Traffic (GHOST) project. The project aims to deliver four layers of security to enable secure operations over untrusted 5G networks. This includes protecting devices from network compromise, anonymizing user identities and locations, obscuring traffic analysis through "ghost" and "false...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a terahertz radar imaging transceiver to improve concealed threat detection for law enforcement and event venue security. The $274,927 award from the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) program will support the design, implementation, fabrication, and testing of a terahertz radar transceiver, a critical component for a portable, discreet security screening...