REU Site: Software Assurance and Security in Emerging Technologies: Research Experience for Undergraduates

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This project establishes a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at the University of North Texas on the topic of software assurance and security in emerging technologies. The proposed REU Site will i) expose undergraduate students to hands-on research experiences in security and software development and testing, ii) enhance their research experience, iii) promote their interests in research, and iv) seed their desire to pursue advanced degrees and careers in CS. The project aims to increase the number of students that pursue graduate studies by exposing students to exciting and attainable research goals, giving them the opportunity to build their resumes with research experiences and publications, and providing a supportive community of peers and mentors that encourage them to be successful. By introducing competition and collaboration as drivers for research innovation, the project intends to achieve a unique and cohesive undergraduate research experience that entices students to pursue graduate studies. Students will gain a background to learn state-of-the-art technical knowledge, the ability to think independently, and the confidence to work on challenging problems. As a result, they will be better prepared to enter the graduate school pipeline. The project's broader significance and importance are that it trains three diverse cohorts of ten students recruited from minorities and underrepresented groups including female students. The project's intellectual merits are that it exposes students to an intense research experience that combines security and software development and testing research with emerging technologies (i.e., web, mobile, and wearable applications) as artifacts used for evaluation of the different research techniques. The intellectual merit of this REU site is reflected in each individual research project, which has interesting and crucial applications that participants can easily identify with. Some projects, designed for highly talented students, seek to advance knowledge and understanding by addressing unsolved problems. Others seek to employ security and testing techniques to solve the real-world problems. The projects will also apply an intellectual approach to encourage students through active learning, free and open exchange of ideas, team spirit, and recognition and rewards for achievements. Specifically, the objectives are to foster i) creative and independent thinking, ii) problem-solving skills and hands-on experience, iii) enthusiasm and confidence, and iv) critical thinking, communication and organization skills. The student projects are designed to include individual and collaborative tasks that foster a strong connection to the group and a better understanding of the larger context of their work. Students work in collaborative teams that explore research questions and innovations in the areas of message integrity, computation on encrypted data for different resource-constrained devices, test suite prioritization, and test suite reduction. The students will investigate cryptographic algorithms and protocols that are suitable for mobile and wearable environments and aim to achieve end-to-end message level integrity and to support computing on encrypted data. They will also conduct empirical studies that hypothesize about the fault detection effectiveness of test suite reduction and test suite prioritization by coverage-based metrics. Empirical studies examine the techniques in the context of emerging technologies (web, mobile, wearable, etc.).