TRUST: in cyberspace and beyond

There is an alarming increase in the number of virus and worm attacks, phishing emails, identity theft both on the internet and physical infrastructures. Indeed, cyberspace has several features of lawlessness which make it difficult for us to mirror societal trust relationships into cyberspace. A cursory examination of the issues involved in an issue like phishing or electronic voting reveals that the problems that we are confronting have both a technology and a policy component. Further, with our increase dependency on computing and communication to instrument physical infrastructures, such as electric power, water, gas, etc. we find that they are vulnerable to information attack as well. To address these grand challenge societal problem, in June 2005, the NSF has established a Science and Technology Center entitled "TRUST: Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies" between Berkeley (lead), CMU, Cornell, Stanford and Vanderbilt with outreach partners at San Jose State, Mills and Smith College. In this talk, I will give you a snap shot of the kinds of research, education, technology transfer, privacy and policy work that we have underway. Rather than present a smorgasbord of work at the Center I will give a selected few examples of the work, technology transfer and impact that the Center has already had in the area of network embedded systems: