Recently, the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program awarded $5 million to the 5G Hidden Operation though Securing Traffic (GHOST) team (shown left) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which includes Applied Mathematics’s own Professor James Curry.
The purpose of GHOST is to eliminate the possibility of external organizations using cellular network data to find cell phone user data, such as physical position, with on-device software. Anonymizing user data is critical for civilian and military usage to keep users safe from unwanted tracking and data mining.
Keith Gremban, the principal investigator of the project, notes that GHOST is “obviously important for soldiers but it’s so much more than that. A lot of companies and nonprofits operate in regions of the world that are less than stable. There have been a rash of kidnappings of corporate executives in some countries.”
NSF’s funding of GHOST is published on the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences newspage, which contains more information about the GHOST project and the team behind the product.