Dr.
Shankar Sastry, Dean of of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, was interviewed by Tom Temin for '
Federal Security Spotlight' on
Federal News Radio in his role as director of the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies (TRUST).
Sastry described how TRUST, funded by the National Science Foundation and housed at the University of California at Berkeley, as a team of some of the best minds from UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, and Stanford Universities with Smith, San Jose State University and Mills College as outreach partners, was formed to examine the interconnection between cyber infrastructure and physical infrastructure. The complex interplay of component technology, policy, law, privacy issues and economic considerations are the motivations for putting together the TRUST Center.
Prof. Sastry described how initially it was the internet that was the primary security concern with various worms and viruses emerging, but as time went on, power, water, telecommmunications and other physical infrastructures also became implicated in security concerns.
Temin raised the issue of security and health-care concerns with electronic medical records/personal health records. The issues, according to Prof. Sastry, are about trying to make sure that (a) we can collect this information and (b) we can make the information available without all the paperwork. Having the data available to the patient is also an objective.
"The issues of privacy and selective disclosure is a subject of some debate", says Sastry. "I think there are legitimate needs for the medical industry to learn about, say, the efficacy of certain drugs", but there is also a tension between personal and medical records that are seen by many entities, billing, pharmaceuticals, different kinds of doctors, he says. Sastry observed the need to stop any 'mining' of this information and a need to be able to stop a 'fishing expedition' in this area.
Trust research is focusing on both the security and the privacy of patients as well as the possibility of a patient 'customizing' their records to make some records available to their doctors only.
Another area of research involves wireless networking vulnerabilities. Sastry describes a scenario where we will literally have a 1000 radios around people, controlling the physical environment by means of embedded rfid's and wireless sensor networks, evolving to a future of computation on wireless devices. Dr. Sastry says we need a reliable and secure medium for a wireless network. Wireless airwaves are not as reliable as a wired infrastructure because they are susceptible to jamming, to retransmission, etc.
A secure communications medium interacts with privacy and security. The privacy agenda enters in subtle ways in that by anonymizing the data, for example with real-time traffic monitoring via cellphone, it is not subverted as a means of tracking someone as they are driving in traffic. Cellphones will be used more and more as sensor networks.
Sastry described TRUST's mission as deriving security solutions in a principled way that is not reactive, as with the cat-and-mouse pattern of attacks followed by solutions followed by new attacks as has been the case thus far.
To listen to the complete interview (in 3 parts), go to
Federal News Radio.
