Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Dijiang Huang,

Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Informatics

“Most of the time, people don’t even notice the security issues when they’re visiting a Web site,” said Dijiang Huang, a CSE assistant professor. “Sometimes they might need a password to log in, but that’s probably the only thing they’ll notice as far as security is concerned.”

Huang notices much more. His background is in network security and his areas of expertise are design and analysis of the security network protocols, secure network architectures and privacy enhancing techniques, which means he’s constantly finding new ways to make computer systems as secure as they can be.

When Huang arrived at ASU, he shifted much of his research focus to the wireless domain. One of his current projects consists of trying to discover the communication pattern of a Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Network.

He explained a hypothetical battlefield scenario involving such communication issues. “There’s ten soldiers and each of them have a handheld device, and they’re moving around and they want to communicate with each other but there’s no fixed wire between them,” Huang said. “In this scenario, how do we secure this communication? One critical issue in this scenario is to make sure that the enemy can’t pick up these signals.”

Yet an equally important aspect in this synopsis is the end to end communication relations, Huang explained. “It’s quite possible that the commander will talk to the soldiers more frequently than the soldiers will talk to other soldiers…it’s important that the critical people within this network, such as the commander, are not able to be identified.”

Thus, the communication patterns must be as secure as the message. “I want to hide the communication relations so that even if someone can capture the signal, they will not be able to tell where it is coming from,” he said. “Once we discover what these communication patterns are, we can start figuring out the protocol to keep a hacker from this.”