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Georgia Institute of Technology > College of Computing > Groups > GVU > FCE > PIE Group

Projects

Current Projects:

DIAMOND

Opportunistic Annexing

SEREFE

Translucent Computing

Previous Projects:

Supporting Routine Decision-Making

Mobile Sensing

Cepher

DynEx M/F

Helping users identify mismatches between their intentions and their computers' actions.

Students: Formerly Rajeev Dayal, currently none (Looking for someone talented to pick this up!)

Spyware, phishing, and malware are both a serious threat and a significant risk in part because of the emphasis in commercial operating systems on making computer systems more opaque: they have worked hard to hide the details of operation in the name of usability. While making computers more opaque is effective when they work exactly as desired, opacity is problematic when the actions of those computers can differ from their users' intentions. We propose translucent computing as an approach to improving computer security and user privacy by reducing the impact and incidence of spyware, phishing, and malware. Translucent computing emphasizes selectively presenting information about a computer's actions to its user to allow him to verify that those actions match his intentions.

  We have implemented an initial framework, Ferret, for gathering network, file, process, and user activity. However, the best approach to presenting a computer's activities to its user remains an open research question. We suspect that users will employ a variety of different visualizations. The example shown here displays a list of the most active sites, allowing users to look for anomalies.