Undergrads get Experience with Big Data Security Thanks to NSF REU Grant
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Tingting Chen acquired a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant which allows Cal Poly Pomona to provide research experience for undergraduates (REU) over the summer. She will also serve as the REU site coordinator. In addition to Chen, Associate Professors Mohammad Husain and Ronald E. Pike will serve as faculty advisors.
The NSF REU program funds a large number of sites that provide research opportunities for undergraduates. Most sites host about ten undergraduates for eight to ten weeks who work on research that the hosting institution is working on. Each student works closely with faculty and other researchers on a specific project. The students receive stipends that may include money for travel and housing.
Site coordinator Chen said, “Our REU program engages undergraduate students in big data security and privacy research, particularly on genomic data privacy, secure multiparty cloud computation and hybrid data center security.” The research is part of a three year endeavor that includes a total of eight projects from which students may choose. This June there will be four Cal Poly Pomona Students and four students from other institutions participating. The eight projects are:
Project 1: GPU-accelerated Encryptions and Decryptions of Big Data
Project 2: Privacy Preserving Big Data Matching Among Medical Institutions
Project 3: Protect Individual Patients’ Privacy in Genomic Data Sharing
Project 4: Design and Implementation of Privacy-Preserving Computation Layer
Project 5: Design and Implementation of Privacy-Preserving Storage Layer
Project 6: Measuring Security Compliance in Hybrid-Cloud Environments
Project 7: Measuring Security Compliance when Systems Migrate to a New Platform
Project 8: Measuring and Maintaining Security Compliance in Live Cloud Migration
Chen will serve as advisor on three of the eight projects. Her specialty is data security for medical information. In the field of medical information security there are two central concerns or problems, one is the immensity of the data, particularly genomic information, and the other is sharing data between agencies in a way that’s not only secure but usable. The latter concern arises from the fact that one database may need specific information from another but sharing only that information and nothing else is a challenge. That challenge will be met with homomorphic encryption which preserves patterns of the original data. It looks random but still allows for extraction of data with matching attributes. The challenge of encrypting and decrypting big data, such as genomic data, will be addressed with specially written GPU coding on the platform that utilizes the parallel processing of a GPU to speed things up.
Associate Professor Husain’s research opportunity has a government focus which differs from Chen’s in that the data is big because of the quantity of entries. It also involves cloud environments. His work addresses similar concerns in relation to the sharing of two or more datasets but will develop extensions of Hadoop (MapReduce/HBase) to solve the challenge of revealing some but not all information to other agencies in need of that information.
Associate Professor Pike’s research opportunity deals with the enormous challenge of maintaining data security when public and private cloud environments need to exchange information and when data is migrated to a new platform. One of the unique goals of his research is to develop a way to create a dashboard or visualization that will display measurements of security compliance during migration.
Chen added that, “This program provides students with an immersive research environment and we teach students research skills through training sessions, hands-on experiments and interactions with experienced researchers. The interdisciplinary nature of this site exposes students to different perspectives of big data security, from theory to application. The faculty members have exceptional expertise in cybersecurity research enabling them to provide high quality REU activities.”