Research Areas

CyLab's research strategy is holistic. Seven areas of research and development have been designated, spanning a wide range of technologies, systems and users. Each project meets the criteria of one or more research areas, with an aim towards building cross-functional and multi-disciplinary solutions and leveraging cross-cutting skills from faculty across the university, such as policy development, risk management or modeling. The objective is to build a new generation of technologies that will lead to measurable, available, secure, trustworthy, and sustainable computing and communications systems, as well as associated management and policy tools that enable successful exploitation of the new technologies. chip

Research Areas

 

Cross-Cutting Thrusts

The following areas of expertise are applied to research projects by leveraging the multi-disciplinary skills of faculty and graduate students at CyLab and across Carnegie Mellon. screen

CyLab in the headlines

CMU professor tells Congress Social Security IT should embrace the cloud - May 10, 2012
"In the 30 years since many of the existing (Social Security Administration) systems were first stood up, storage capacities, network bandwidth, processing power, and the cost of these things have all improved by between 4 and 6 orders of magnitude," Carnegie Mellon CyLab researcher William Scherlis said in written testimony. "That’s a factor of a million. If skyscrapers increased in height by that factor, they would scrape the moon."

The Post-Cash, Post-Credit-Card Economy - April 28, 2012
Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon CyLab smiled. If today all you need to do is enter your phone number and PIN when you visit a store, perhaps tomorrow, he said, that store will be able to detect your phone by its unique identifier as soon as you enter. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, he went on, you won’t have to shop at all. Your vast piles of shopping data would be instead collected, analyzed and used to tell you exactly what you need: a new motorcycle from Ducati, perhaps, or purple rain boots in the next size for your growing child. Money will be seamlessly taken from your account. A delivery will arrive at your doorstep.

Big Mac Attack: Apple Security Bruised after OS X Infections - April 25, 2012
"In the computer community we've been saying for five, six, seven years that Mac is not more immune to computer viruses than Windows PCs or even Linux boxes, " says Nicolas Christin, researcher at Carnegie Mellon CyLab. "The only reason Macs were not massively targeted is that they didn't have enough of a market share to make them interesting for a hacker to devote resources to try to compromise those machines. Now that they've acquired a fairly sizeable market share, it makes sense that the bad guys would focus some attention on the Mac platform."

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