Research Areas
Hardware Security and Electronic Design Automation
The mission of the Hardware Security and Electronic Design Automation laboratory is to create and design new techniques for the capture of system specifications and to automatically synthesize, verify, and test the resulting system. Our laboratory personnel work on projects related to conventional electronic and emerging quantum and nano-based systems. An emphasis on the application of fundamental knowledge in discrete mathematics, algorithms, and system design principles is the underlying philosophy behind research projects.
People
- Faculty: Jennifer Dworak, Theodore Manikas, Mitch Thornton
- Students: Laura Bennett, Jeff Collins, Saurabh Gupta, David Kebo Houngninou, Xi Shen, Micah Thornton, Fanchen Zhang, Adam Zygmontowicz
Cyber Security
The mission of the Cyber Security Lab is to nurture education, research and development of security technologies for systems ranging from the physical layer to the application layer. In that spirit, our projects range from border and transportation security to application layer security against phishing attacks. Over the past 10 years, research in the Cyber Security Lab has provided the basis for Security Engineering curriculum in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at SMU's Lyle School of Engineering.
People
- Faculty: Frederick Chang, Tyler Moore, Suku Nair
- Students: Bilal Alqudah, Will Bengtson, Ala' Eshmawi
Security Economics
Economics puts the challenges facing information security into perspective better than a purely technical approach does. Systems often fail because the organizations that defend them do not bear the full costs of failure. In order to solve the problems of growing vulnerability and increasing crime, solutions must coherently allocate responsibilities and liabilities so that the parties in a position to fix problems have an incentive to do so. This requires a technical comprehension of security threats combined with an economic perspective to uncover the strategies employed by attackers and defenders.
The security economics lab conducts research measuring various forms cybercrime in order to improve our understanding of how attackers and defenders behave. We emphasize empirical analysis of security incidents that can be directly observed, driven by the belief that security failures must be studied from the concrete, not the hypothetical. We also attempt to quantify the costs and benefits of security mechanisms where possible.
We collaborate with researchers at institutions across the US and internationally, including Carnegie Mellon University, Penn State, the University of New Mexico, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Münster. For more information and publications, see http://lyle.smu.edu/~tylerm/eis.html.
People
- Faculty: Tyler Moore
- Students: Jake Drew, Richard Ernst, Lewis Sykalski, Marie Vasek