Dachman-Soled Wins 2016-17 Graduate School Research and Scholarship Summer Award

Dana Dachman-Soled, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering with appointments in UMIACS and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), was recently selected to receive a UMD Graduate School Faculty Support Award.

She will receive a Research and Scholarship Award (RASA) for the summer of the 2016-2017 academic year to support her project, “Data Integrity for Dynamic Memory via Locally Decodable and Updatable Non-Malleable Codes.”

The goal of the project is to take locally decodable and updatable non-malleable codes—a new notion originally developed by Dachman-Soled and student researchers for the purpose of achieving security for dynamic memory in the hardware tampering setting—and to apply them to a server-client setting.

The project will focus on settings where databases are stored across two or more servers and are continually accessed by a large number of authorized users, e.g. a database storing medical records in a large hospital. If the servers are hacked, the new methodology should prevent the attacker from downloading meaningful data, or worse, modifying data stored in the database.