Susan Older

Associate Professor,
Computer Science Undergraduate Program Director, Interim Department Chair EECS

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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.