Project staff and support

Neil Moore (Intern, University of St Andrews)
Helen Balinsky (Company Supervisor, HP Labs)
Steven Simske (Company Supervisor, HP Labs)
Ian Gent (Academic Mentor, University of St Andrews)
Rushen Patel (Technology Translator, Industrial Mathematics KTN)

This Internship project is being carried out at HP Labs, in conjunction with the University of St. Andrews. It is part of the KTN's Industrial Mathematics KTP Programme, co-funded by EPSRC. Start date: February 2011; duration: 6 months.

Project description

HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for Hewlett-Packard, tackling complex challenges facing HP's customers and society over the next decade, while pushing the frontiers of fundamental science.

The topic for the internship is a central one in information systems security: sensitive data leak prevention. From malicious intent to simple negligence, from a genuine (accidental) error to profound incompetence and lack of adequate training, a wide variety of human actions can lead to confidential, private or even top secret information being exposed and lost. Data leak incidents range from sending a sensitive e-mail to the wrong address to uploading a confidential document instead of a conference submission; and from saving an unprotected document backup on ‘easy-to-lose’ USB to printing a sensitive document on a widely accessible printer and then forgetting it is there. It is hard to underestimate the long term damage caused by the recent high profile diplomatic cables leak in the United States. We are looking to advance -- the newly developed in HP Laboratories -- Data Leak Prevention framework by incorporating content-based policies.