The UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) is proud to announce the recipients of our 2020 research grants. In total, 22 different groups of researchers will share nearly $1 million in funding to support a broad range of initiatives addressing cybersecurity and digital security issues at the intersection of technology and society, including secure machine learning, data protection policy, detecting malicious photo manipulation, and more. Five of the projects were jointly funded with the UC Berkeley Center for Technology, Society, and Policy, a multi-disciplinary research center focused on emergent social and policy issues of technology.
We are also pleased to announce that Nathan Malkin, a UC Berkeley PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has received the 2020 Cal Cybersecurity Research fellowship to support his research on privacy controls for “always-listening” devices. This special award is made possible by a generous gift from an anonymous donor. (Read an interview with Nathan Malkin to learn more about his project.)
The purpose of CLTC’s research funding is to address the most interesting and complex challenges of today’s socio-technical security environment, and to grapple with the broader challenges of the next decade’s environment.
Some of the grants are renewals of previously funded projects that have already yielded important results, including research on secure machine learning, the security of “smart” city infrastructure, and detecting manipulated images. New initiatives to be funded include studies on the privacy and security of mobile health apps; understanding and defending against nation-state targeting of dissidents’ devices; secure authentication in blockchain environments; and more.
All principal investigators (PIs) have a UC Berkeley research affiliation, and some of the initiatives involve partners from outside institutions. The funded projects support researchers from a broad array of disciplines and academic units, including the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), School of Information, School of Social Welfare, International Computer Science Institute, Simons Institute, and the Department of Statistics and other social science units.
“CLTC is delighted to be able to support UC Berkeley researchers working at the forefront of cybersecurity for the fifth year in a row,” said Ann Cleaveland, Executive Director of CLTC. “The research being done by our grantees is crucial for informing changes in the world of cybersecurity behaviors, technologies, policies, markets, and beyond. Ultimately, this work is about strengthening trust in digital systems, which is more important than ever as we enter the new decade. Congratulations to our 2020 grantees.”
Visit this page for summaries of CLTC’s 2020 grantees, or check out our 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 grantees. You can also search for past and present grants on the CLTC Grant Program page.
