Adequately addressing security and privacy concerns requires a combination of technical, social, and legal approaches. Topics currently under active investigation in the department include mathematical modeling of security properties, implementation and application of cryptographic protocols, secure and privacy-preserving distributed algorithms, trust management, verification of security properties, and proof-carrying code.

Cryptography or cryptology (from Greek kryptós, "hidden, secret"; and graphein, "writing", or , "study", respectively) is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries.