Securing the “internet of things” with Professor Landau

Over the past year I’ve had the great pleasure to get to know Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy Susan Landau. A bridge professorship is a unique appointment that involves split time between multiple institutions, in Prof. Landau’s case between Fletcher and the Tufts School of Engineering (in the Department of Computer Science). Working with Prof. Landau on the admissions process for the new M.S. in Cybersecurity and Public Policy, a joint degree program between those two schools, has acquainted me some with her work and areas of expertise, as well as having made me ashamed of all the online passwords I use that are surely not nearly as robust as they should be.

Prof. Landau’s work on a major new research program regarding the “internet of things” therefore caught my eye. Many of us have a variety of internet-enabled devices in our lives and homes these days, all of which amass loads of data about our habits that raise important privacy and security questions. With a new five-year, $10 million research program from the National Science Foundation, Prof. Landau will focus on the trade-offs involved between efficiency and ease of use with customer privacy and data security. We’re all lucky to have her working on these issues that affect nearly all of us on a daily basis.

Read more about this major new initiative here.