Having grown up in the Soviet Union, Brown CS Professor Anna Lysyanskaya knew the "constant horror" of Big Brother and the importance of privacy. Now her work with encryption, designed to keep information safe, has made her one of the 35 Young Innovators Under 35 in the September-October issue of Technology Review.

With most subscription Web sites, users are prompted for a personal identifier – like a user name – and the site administrator then stores that information and likely tracks viewed pages. And that is where the problem starts, according to Lysyanskaya.

“That would be how things work right now, but the [vulnerability with] this model of doing things is that you leave some sort of a trail,” she said...So, instead of a user name, Lysyanskaya said Web sites should be asking for some other sort of proof for users.

It works like this: Lysyanskaya’s program would be installed on both the user’s and Web site administrator’s computers, and when a user logs in, the computers would separately generate the same password – different for each login by every user — to determine the user’s identity.