The Carnegie Mellon University Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) was established in the Spring of 2004 to bring together Carnegie Mellon University researchers working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and improving the usability of privacy and

security software Computer security software or cybersecurity software is any computer program designed to influence information security. This is often taken in the context of defending computer systems or data, yet can incorporate programs designed specifically ...

and systems. The privacy and security research community has become increasingly aware that usability problems severely impact the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to provide security and privacy in software systems. Indeed, one of the four grand research challenges in information security and assurance identified by the

Computing Research Association The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit association of North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia enga ...

in 2003 is: "Give end-users security controls they can understand and privacy they can control for the dynamic, pervasive computing environments of the future." This is the challenge that CUPS strives to address. CUPS is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon

CyLab The Carnegie Mellon CyLab Security and Privacy Institute is a computer security research center at Carnegie Mellon University. Founded in 2003 as a university-wide research center, it involves more than 50 faculty and 100 graduate students from di ...

and has members from the Engineering and Public Policy Department, the School of Computer Science, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, the

Heinz College The Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, often called Heinz College, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is a private graduate college that consists of one of the nation's top-ranked public policy schools— ...

, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. It is directed by

Lorrie Cranor Lorrie Faith Cranor, D.Sc. is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and is the director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. She has served as Chi ...

Projects

* P3P and computer-readable privacy policies ** Two members of the CUPS Lab are members of the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

P3P Working Group, working on developing the P3P 1.1 specification. ** In the fall of 2005,

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

gave the rights to the source code and trademarks surroundin
Privacy Bird
their P3P user-agent. Privacy Bird is currently maintained and distributed by the lab. ** In the summer of 2005, the lab made available to the public a "P3P-enabled search engine", known as Privacy Finder. It allowed a user to reorder search results based on whether each site complied with his or her privacy preferences. This information was gleaned from P3P policies found on the web sites. Since 2012, Privacy Finder has been "temporarily out of service", with no indication of when service would be restored. ** Additionally, the lab archives web sites privacy policies and has been creating a toolkit to aid in the automated analysis of both P3P policies as well as natural language privacy policies. * Supporting trust decisions ** More recently, the lab is examining trends in phishing attacks as well as users' perceptions of these attacks to develop better methods of detecting and reporting phishing messages.

External links

The official CUPS Lab web sitePrivacy BirdPrivacy Finder
{{coord, 40.444423, -79.942984, type:edu_globe:earth_region:US-PA, display=title 2004 establishments in Pennsylvania Privacy software Schools and departments of Carnegie Mellon