National Science Foundation funds Compagnoni team's research in Secure Electronic Transactions

HOBOKEN, N.J. - A Stevens Institute of Technology Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Dr. Adriana B. Compagnoni, is the Principal Investigator for a $420,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Information Technology Research (ITR) grant, in a project that seeks new ways to approach secure electronic transactions, with implications for safe and unhampered communications in the worlds of finance, banking, electronic voting, online credit-card purchases - even, eventually, robotic communications for the successful exploration of outer space.

Dr. Elsa Gunter of the New Jersey Institute of Technology is a Co-Principal Investigator in the project, along with a Stevens Professor of Political Science, Dr. Arnold B. Urken. The project received its first funding in Sept. 2002 and is now funded through August 2005.

Compagnoni is a 2001 recipient of a prestigious NSF CAREER Award for outstanding early career achievement.

"This Secure Electronic Transactions project concerns authentication, audit trails, and privacy in secure electronic transactions, with the intended scope encompassing a wide array of daily activities such as banking, on-line shopping, elections, and surveys," says Compagnoni. "Some of these activities are already based in part on electronic transactions today, but would benefit from better mechanisms for security. Other activities have the potential to be performed electronically given greater confidence in the security infrastructure surrounding electronic transactions."

The project develops the design of a concurrent domain-specific language for concurrent electronic transactions that will provide more security guarantees and automation of checks than has been previously done in such languages. It proposes an alternative to security based on software packages with dynamic checks, by a type-theory-based approach where security guarantees are verified automatically and statically via type-checking, factoring out checks that other approaches perform dynamically for every execution, and performing them only once at compile time.

"Efforts in these directions are potentially rich in social and economic benefits," said Stephen Bloom, director of the Stevens Department of Computer Science. "Research on secure electronic transactions will directly reduce the incidence of electronic fraud, theft, and forgery, improving the quality and extending the scope of the software available to the general public."

Ultimately, says Compagnoni, this research has implications for robotic communications for space missions. "NASA has suffered setbacks through communications errors involving probes to the other planets," she said. "I think our approach could possibly offer solutions to those problems."

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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