CSE Colloquium: Wenjing Lou

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

11:30-12:30

HBL Class of 1947 Conference room

(located behind Bookworms in the Library)

Title: Towards Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace: From Network-centric to Information-centric Cyber-defense

Abstract:

The explosive deployment of advanced computer and telecommunication technologies has led to a vast expansion of the cyberspace, which has transformed our daily lives. At the same time, the rush to adopt cyberspace has exposed its fragility and vulnerabilities: critical infrastructure, government, businesses, and individuals have been victims of cyber-attacks.

A secure and trustworthy cyberspace is never an easy task. It demands multiple lines of defense from different angles to thwart attacks from every corner of the cyberspace. It also requires the integration of security and privacy mechanisms into computing and networking functions. In this talk, I will briefly introduce some of our research works on network security, we will then focus on the unique challenges in protecting data security and privacy in cloud computing. With more and more information on individuals and businesses moving into the cloud, traditional data confidentiality, integrity, and access control mechanisms become insufficient. I will describe our research efforts on scalable and owner-centric secure data storage and sharing, public integrity verification of outsourced cloud data, and privacy-preserving search over encrypted cloud data. Many of these new security and privacy problems are very challenging and call for interdisciplinary expertise from a number of technical domains.   

Bio:

Wenjing Lou is a Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of the IEEE. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research interest focusing on privacy protection techniques in networked information systems and cross-layer security enhancement in wireless networks.

Prof. Lou is currently Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and Journal of Computer Security. She is the Steering Committee Chair of IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (IEEE CNS), which is a conference series in IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) core conference portfolio and the only ComSoc conference focusing solely on cybersecurity.

Since August 2014, Prof. Lou has been serving as a program director at the US National Science Foundation (NSF). At NSF, her responsibilities include the Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program, a core program of the Computer and Network Systems (CNS) division within the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), and the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a cross-cutting security program led by CISE/CNS.