Communication, Networks and Security

Protecting copyright is one of the hottest topics in information and media technology at the moment. Digital technology enables perfect copying on amateur equipment. Digital Fingerprinting is an emerging technology to protect multimedia from unauthorized redistribution. It embeds a unique ID into each user's copy, which can be extracted to help identify culprits when an unauthorized leak is found. Thereby any emerging illegitimate copy can be traced back to the guilty party. A major challenge is to make this system secure against coalitions of pirates.

Botnets are networks consisting of computers that are infected with malicious codes (malware) and are consequently being remotely controlled by botnet operators. Botnets pose some of the most challenging security problems owing to their ubiquitousness, their size, their complexity, and the effectiveness with which they have been used to facilitate and perpetuate a wide range of cybercrimes.

 
About twenty-five years ago a spelunker was lost in a Pennsylvania cave system. A mathematician at Pennsylvania State University was asked to help design an efficient search of the cave system. This mathematician happened to be a graph theorist and as a cave system may be modelled as a graph, it led him to introduce the general problem of searching graphs.

 
Game Theory studies the phenomena occurring when independent, autonomous entities, called agents or users, act selfishly; game theoretic techniques are now being used to model and analyze networks. This project aims to develop a more realistic modelling of communication and data networks of selfish users using game-theoretic models, study the effects that selfish behaviour has on the overall network performance, and the designs of networks which prevent the rapid degradation of the performance due to such behaviour.