Communications of the ACM
Nsf Funds CM Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Privacy and Security
Carnegie Mellon "will offer Ph.D. students a new cross-disciplinary training experience that helps them produce solutions to ongoing tensions between security, privacy and usability," says associate professor Lorrie Cranor.
Credit: lorrie.cranor.org
Carnegie Mellon University has received a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to launch a Ph.D. program in usable privacy and security. "Carnegie Mellon's CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Doctoral Training Program will offer Ph.D. students a new cross-disciplinary training experience that helps them produce solutions to ongoing tensions between security, privacy and usability," says Institute for Software Research associate professor Lorrie Cranor, associate professor in the Institute for Software Research, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and Carnegie Mellon CyLab.
Cranor says the CUPS doctoral training program is designed to give students classroom learning and collaborative research training through teams of mentors from various fields, internships, and summer seminars. Cranor says students will be expected to be actively involved in Carnegie Mellon's broad usable privacy and security research, which focuses on three approaches — finding ways to build systems that work without requiring humans in security-critical capacities, finding ways of making secure systems intuitive and easy to use, and finding ways to effectively teach humans to perform security-critical tasks.
"Internet users are told that they need to install anti-virus software and spam filters and follow all sorts of security rules, and come up with lots of complex passwords that they are not supposed to write down. Users are feeling overwhelmed, and we need to find ways of helping them stay safe," says Cranor.
From Carnegie Mellon News
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