A computer engineer at the University of Rhode Island has been awarded a five-year, $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support her work developing a systematic plan for a “trust infrastructure” for computer networks.

A major challenge for computer users today is to figure out which computers’ content is safe – which e-mail attachments can be safely opened, for example, and which will plant a virus or spyware in their machines.

Yan Sun, an assistant professor at URI who specializes in wireless computer network security, is working to build better ways to evaluate the trustworthiness of individual users within a network than the current systems...

...To aid her research, Sun is studying trust from a social science perspective and adapting it to computer networks. The innovative research approach was among the reasons the National Science Foundation awarded Sun one of its most prestigious grants, given to young scholars whom the foundation deems likeliest to become future academic leaders, according to URI. Sun is only the fourth URI researcher to receive the grant in the last decade.