Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Partha Dasgupta,

Associate Professor, School of Computing and Informatics

Maybe it’s an e-mail from the Prince of Nigeria in a desperate financial plight. Perhaps there’s an urgent message from your bank telling you to follow their link and change your password. Next, you realize that a home entertainment system has been purchased in your name and you’re not the one watching DVDs on it. You’ve been had.

Partha Dasgupta seeks to minimize such experiences. His current research focuses on consumer computing security. In the last two years, Dasgupta’s work has centered around “securing normal people’s web transactions, financial transactions, combating credit card fraud and identity theft.”

“Online banking works,” Dasgupta said, “but it’s prone to all kinds of attacks…right now, the number one threat is phishing, which is managing to get your password out of you.”

Dasgupta and his team of graduate students apply their knowledge towards securing web transactions through virus prevention. “We have built two prototypes, that stop even quite smart viruses, called rootkits. The first prototype uses a virtual machine to protect the operating system and deploy malware detectors that are undefeatable. The second method is similar but uses a special hardware device embedded into the computer. This is able to detect unauthorized tampering.”

Funded, in part, by the NSF , Dasgupta’s research also seeks a better understanding of how to handle privacy and computers. In today’s technology-driven world, “temporary access doesn’t mean temporary anymore. The moment I can see something, I can save a copy.” As Dasgupta tries to understand what constitutes privacy and how to keep sensitive information from being spread around the internet, he recognizes, “We cannot be 100 percent private, nor can we be a hundred percent open. Where do we draw the line? It’s a debate that has social and technical implications.”