The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity provides funding to UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers working on a diverse range of security issues, with an emphasis on four priority areas: machine learning and artificial intelligence, building the cyber-talent pipeline, improving cybersecurity governance, and protecting vulnerable online populations. Search below to learn more about our past and current grantees.
Nathan Malkin, PhD Student, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Intelligent voice assistants and the microphone-equipped Internet of Things devices that support them are very convenient but carry significant privacy risks. Newer and future devices extend these risks by listening all the time — beyond a few specific keywords. The goal of our research is to develop privacy controls for...
Mehtabk Khan, JSD Student, School of Law, UC Berkeley
Cybersecurity workers are in high demand but short supply. During the Covid-19 crisis, we have seen a greater need for cybersecurity professionals as e-commerce has skyrocketed, universities have shifted online, and millions of Americans are working from home on personal networks. There are also significant diversity challenges to the cybersecurity...
Nikita Samarin, PhD Student, EECS, UC Berkeley Chris Hoofnagle, Professor of Law in Residence and Adjunct Professor, School of Information, UC Berkeley Jordan Fischer, Professor of Law and Lecturer, School of Information, UC Berkeley and Drexel University School of Law Primal Wijesekera, Staff Research Scientist, International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley
The United States lacks a comprehensive federal privacy regulation and instead relies on industry-specific or state-specific discrete privacy laws. On the state level, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—which came into effect on January 1, 2020, and became enforceable on July 1, 2020— was enacted to provide enhanced privacy protections...
Joanne Ma, Graduate Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley Alisa Frik, Postdoctoral Researcher, International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley
With the smartphone penetration rate reaching over 80% in the US, smartphone settings remain one of the main models for information privacy and security controls. Yet, their usability is largely understudied, especially with respect to the usability impact on underrepresented socio-economic and low-tech groups. In this project we will estimate...
Computer vision has been integrated into many areas of our lives, including facial recognition, augmented reality, autonomous driving, and healthcare. However, making them more accurate and generalizing to real world data alone is no longer sufficient, we have to safe-guard their robustness against malicious attacks in cyberspace. Compared with the...
Noura Alomar, PhD Student, International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley Primal Wijesekera, Staff Research Scientist, International Computer Science Institute, UC Berkeley
Security vulnerabilities pose a grave danger to the integrity of any system because they can undermine almost any protection mechanism organizations put in place to defend themselves against potential attacks. As such, finding vulnerabilities before the software gets deployed or after putting software in production is a critical task in...
Ji Su Yoo, PhD Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley
Misinformation and disinformation campaigns often rely on bots and fake accounts to impersonate human users with similar demographic characteristics, political beliefs, and social values as their audience to establish credibility. Such nefarious efforts are successful because human beliefs and behaviors about new information are based on the identity of the...
David Ng, Graduate Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley Cristian Bravo-Lillo, Lecturer, School of Information, UC Berkeley Jacky Ho, Graduate Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley Christian Hercules, Graduate Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley Stuart Schechter, Lecturer, School of Information, UC Berkeley
Password managers adoptions are becoming the norm these days, but are they also encouraging best practices for its users? Do they use complex and unique passwords or do they just store weak passwords? We discovered that many users ignore password reset notifications. We are motivated to find a path to...
Chelsie Lui, Undergraduate Student, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Hoa Nguyen, Graduate Student, San Francisco State University Jin Pu, Graduate Student, Columbia University Mikayla O'Reggio, Undergraduate Student, Rausser College of Natural Resources, UC Berkeley
Emma Lurie, PhD Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley
In the United States, people are increasingly turning to online sources to find information about elections. Election information includes everything from mail-in ballot instructions to candidate Facebook page posts. In the U.S., as well as around the world, online misinformation threatens democratic systems. Politicians, technology companies, journalists, and voters all...