Associate Professor,
Computer Science Undergraduate Program Director
4-131 CST
sbolder@syr.edu
315.443.4679
Degrees:
- B.S. in Computer Science, Washington University
- Ph.D. in Pure & Applied Logic, Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests:
- Semantics of programming languages
- Logics of programs
- Access control, security, and trust
- Concurrency theory
Current Research:
My research primarily focuses on the development and application of mathematical models and specialty logics that support reasoning about complex system behavior, such as concurrency and cyber security. My recent work (joint with Shiu-Kai Chin) has centered on a modal logic for reasoning about access control, security, and trust. This logic can be applied at all levels of abstraction, from organizational policies to network protocols to operating-system requirements to hardware.
I am also interested in the technology transfer of these ideas (specifically, through undergraduate and graduate education): how does one best enable budding engineers and computer scientists to deploy these methods to develop assured systems?
Courses Taught:
- Discrete mathematics
- Functional programming
- Programming languages
- Applications of formal methods for assurance
Selected Publications:
Textbook
Shiu-Kai Chin and Susan Older, Access Control, Security, and Trust: A Logical Approach, Taylor & Francis CRC Press, 2011.
Articles
Susan Older and Shiu-Kai Chin, “Engineering Assurance at the Undergraduate Level,” IEEE Security & Privacy, Volume 10, Number 6, pages 74-77, Nov/Dec 2012.
Shiu-Kai Chin, Erich Devendorf, Sarah Muccio, Susan Older, and James Royer, “Formal Verification for Mission Assurance in Cyberspace,” Proceedings of the 16th Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education, Orlando, Florida, June 2012.
Glenn Benson, Shiu-Kai Chin, Sean Croston, Karthick Jayaraman, and Susan Older, “Credentials Management for High-Value Transactions,” in Igor Kotenko and Victor Skormin (Eds.), Computer Network Security, 5th International Conference on Mathematical Methods, Models and Architectures for Computer Network Security (MMM-ACNS), St. Petersburg, Russia, September 2010.