Communications of the ACM
NSF Grant Funds Research on Wearable Device Security
Grad student Anindya Maiti (left), assistant professor Murtuza Jadliwala (right), and other Wichita State University researchers are assisting an NSF-funded study of wearable device security.
Credit: Wichita State University
Two Wichita State University professors have been awarded a $380,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to investigate cybersecurity and privacy issues for wearable devices.
Murtuza Jadliwala, assistant electrical engineering and computer science professor, and Jibo He, assistant psychology professor, will start their three-year project this fall.
The grant will be primarily used to support graduate students, especially doctoral candidates, working alongside He and Jadliwala.
With the recent boom in smartphone and wearable devices – such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart glasses – information security threats and privacy concerns have become critical issues for consumers, information technology companies, and application developers, says Jadiwala, director of WSU's Security, Privacy, Trust and Ethics in Computing Research Lab.
"This project focuses on overcoming these concerns," he says. "It has the potential of having long-term impact on how wearable devices are designed by companies and how these devices are used by people in the future."
Surviving Threats
Goals for this research include demonstrating what security threats make wearable devices vulnerable and then designing authentication techniques and mechanisms to survive those threats.
Some of the grant money will allow the researchers and students to travel to conferences and present their research results, buy wearable device equipment for research, and for costs related to experiments involving volunteer participants.
The team has already seen some interesting preliminary results, and Jadliwala says they're excited to get moving with the help of the grant.
"This award is significant for both the departments and colleges, as well as WSU, as it helps showcase the high-quality research carried out at WSU in the critical area of cybersecurity," he says.
The results of this research will also help further much of the work done by He, who is director of WSU's Human Automation Interaction Lab. He has completed extensive work in the field of wearable devices as they relate to driver drowsiness, distracted driving, and usability testing.
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