About

The 2011 Summer Institute, cosponsored by the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering and Microsoft Research will be held at the Suncadia Resort in Cle Elum, Washington from July 24-27, 2011. Cle Elum is located in the Cascades, ninety minutes southeast of Seattle.

Abstract

We are seeing two significant trends in computing. First, technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in consumer spaces — on our bodies, in our homes, in our work spaces, and in our cars. Second, data is increasingly offloaded to the "cloud" for storage, computation, aggregation, and sharing. These trends are also deeply intertwined, as cloud services make personal mobile devices ever more attractive.

Today's consumer and cloud systems are, however, only a small shadow of the types of systems we may see in future. These future systems bring great promise but also have the potential to bring with them significant security and privacy risks. Already, the U.S. Congress is asking questions about location information sent back by today’s phones to mobile operators and OS developers.

The goal of this summer institute is to identify new directions for consumer and cloud computing, discuss the challenges for protecting security and privacy in a consumer and cloud computing world, and explore directions for mitigating those challenges. We are bringing together researchers and practitioners from diverse but relevant areas such as computer security, cryptography, mobile systems, cloud computing, systems and networking, and HCI to discuss the state-of-the-art and identify directions for future research and collaboration. Some examples of topics we will explore include:

• Tensions between privacy and functionality in cloud services for mobile devices
• The impact of future mobile sensors, displays, and "augmented reality" on privacy and security
• The interplay between online social networks and security in the physical world
• Social aspects of access to cloud services and mobile devices
• Opportunities for privacy by design, including the use of secure multi party computation and other cryptographic methods
• Additional topics as led by participants!

Organizers: Yoshi Kohno (UW CSE), David Molnar (MSR), and Helen Wang (MSR)

Descriptions of past summer institutes may be viewed at: www.cs.washington.edu/mssi/.