Vincent Bindschaedler of UF is researching surveillanceware and developing novel, AI-based defenses for it. The project will broaden cybersecurity research to include vulnerable individuals and groups whose cybersecurity needs have been neglected historically.

“The system we envision is a deception-based system that uses artificial intelligence techniques, specifically deep generative models, to produce fake but plausible ‘synthetic’ data,” Bindschaedler said. “The synthetic data will be fed to the surveillanceware instead of the victim’s real sensitive data. This will mitigate the privacy threat of surveillanceware actively monitoring the victim’s device.”

• Vincent Bindschaedler