I enjoy designing systems that achieve robustness
through adaptation to changing constraints.
My recent focus has been in decentralized systems, including
mechanisms for expressing and enforcing security relationships
among mutually distrustful administrative domains, securely deploying
mobile agents, and the efficient dissemination of on-line content.
My background also includes electrical design, architecture, interprocess
coordination, and computer vision.
A summary of my research appears below.
A more formal research statement (in Acrobat
format) is also available.
Security Infrastructure for Decentralized Systems
I presently lead an effort of the
Parallel and Distributed Systems Group (PDSG) to investigate the security needs of
mobile agents deployed into dynamic environments that span a large
number of administrative domains.
The PDSG is lead by Vijay Karamcheti, with whom I
collaborate closely.
The deployment of and communication between mobile agents requires the
establishment of sustained authorizing trust relationships
between agents and systems that host them, and other agents
with whom they interact. Existing component-based frameworks (e.g.
J2EE and grid) do not
offer appropriate security guarantees for coalition systems
that span multiple mutually-distrustful administrative domains.
In order to address these challenges, we developed
a deployment substrate for mobile agents called
DisCo and a
decentralized role-based access control system called
dRBAC.
I am also investigating
quantified trust management, that includes
mechanisms for trust aggregation that may increase the
expressiveness and scalability of access control systems.
An extended summary of this work
is available online at http://rlab.cs.nyu.edu/~freudent/pdsg.html.
Orchestration of Distributed Systems
I am also collaborating with Michael Freedman and David Mazieres in
the development of 