New University of Michigan Faculty Members Join TerraSwarm

TerraSwarm is pleased to announce the addition of two new University of Michigan faculty members with expertise in Privacy and Security.  Alex Halderman and Stephane Lafortune will officially come on board beginning in May.

Alex Halderman’s research focuses on problems that broadly impact society and public policy. His interests include software security, network security, data privacy, anonymity, electronic voting, censorship resistance, digital rights management, computer forensics, ethics, and cybercrime, as well as the interaction of technology with law, governmental regulation, and international affairs.

Halderman states: "Through our involvement in TerraSwarm, we hope to provide perspective on the security challenges affecting past and present systems and lay the foundations for security solutions for the Swarm that are both innovative and practically achievable. Our close collaboration with the other Swarm participants will help bridge the gap between the security and embedded systems communities and spawn broader research on security technologies that will be suitable for the future that the project envisions. At the same time, we aim to be a resource for the TerraSwarm team and help all project members better understand the security mindset."

Stephane Lafortune's general area of expertise is Systems and Control Engineering.  His research interests are in Discrete Event Systems (DES), including modeling, analysis, supervisory control, optimal control, and diagnosis of this class of dynamical systems. He is also working on applications of DES in computer and communication systems and in software systems.

According to Lafortune: "We propose to develop new techniques to assess the degree of privacy and to enforce desired privacy requirements at the level of individual users interacting with TerraSwarm applications, based on an information flow property known as opacity. This research is complementary to current privacy-preserving monitoring and control activities in Task D.3.4 and to current security analysis of TerraSwarm systems in Task D.4.3."

Their deep knowledge and understanding of security and privacy issues will be a valuable addition to the TerraSwarm team.  To learn more about Alex Halderman and Stephane Lafortune, visit their websites:

• Alex Halderman: https://jhalderm.com
• Stephane Lafortune: https://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/etc/fac/facsearchform1.cgi?uniqname=stephane&div=EECS