SCHOLAR SPOTLIGHT

McKenna Lovejoy, a Harry L. Willett Foundation scholar pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering, is among the students at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs benefiting from the cyber security program.  This summer, McKenna participated in a study abroad program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.  As she explained, communication networks are like a cake with many layers, each layer being a pathway for transmitting information, and typically data encryption occurs only in the higher levels of the stacked layers. The challenge is that as traffic on the internet of things increases exponentially, many systems lack the bandwidth to correspondingly increase encryption capabilities. McKenna’s work is focused on finding and taking advantage of properties of the lower levels of the stack that can be used earlier in the transmission sequence to better protect data.