Wenjing Lou

Virginia Tech, USA

Picture of Wenjing Lou

Abstract

Despite the security and privacy concerns around moving data into the cloud, the cloud adoption has swept the enterprise IT market in the past decade. Many companies, big or small, have moved their IT services to the cloud. Many new applications also rely on a cloud backend to provide seemingly unlimited computing and storage capabilities as well as ubiquitous access anytime anywhere. At the same time, the rush to adopt cloud has exposes its vulnerabilities and risks. Just as unprecedented the capability and accessibility the cloud provides to its users, the scale of data theft and privacy leakage in the cloud becomes much larger and the damage caused more severe. The recent Facebook privacy crisis is an example of this devastating consequent.
In this talk, I will review our past work on data security and privacy in cloud computing. I will describe our research efforts on scalable and owner-centric secure data storage and sharing, public integrity verification of outsourced cloud data, and privacy-preserving search over encrypted cloud data. I will also talk about our recent research shift, from pure software- (i.e., crypto and algorithm) based data protection solutions, to hardware-assisted trustworthy data computation and protection, and a blockchain-based privacy policy enforcement framework.

Biography

Wenjing Lou is the W. C. English Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Fellow of the IEEE. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. Her research interests cover many topics in the cybersecurity field, with her current research interest focusing on privacy protection techniques in networked information systems and cross-layer security enhancement in wireless networks.
Prof. Lou is currently on the editorial boards of ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and Journal of Computer Security. She is the Steering Committee Chair of IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (IEEE CNS), which is a conference series in IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) core conference portfolio and the only ComSoc conference focusing solely on cybersecurity.