Professor Chan focuses on cryptography and communication security. In particular, she researches efficient algorithms for generating symmetric keys and analyzes their security. More recently, she has concentrated her efforts on resource constrained devices and networks, and designs efficient schemes for managing key updates under dynamically changing envirnment. She has also worked on designing divisible electronic cash (e-cash), which often requires exact payment in cash transactions and is more efficient when subdivided into smaller denominations to be spent independently.
With private communications carried out via public channels, security and integrity are increasingly important issues in designing coding schemes. Professor Chan’s research considers coding schemes that are easy to implement, make it difficult for others to eavesdrop, and are resilient to noise interference.
Professor Chan has generated and studied pseudo-random sequences for ultrafast networks. With researchers at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, she has considered use of nonlinear feedback functions to design an ultrafast optical feedback shift register sequence generator to encrypt large, bursty files for transmission through optical TDM networks.
Professor Chan co-founded Northeastern’s Institute for Information Assurance and initiated the development of a joint master’s degree in Information Assurance. She played a lead role in the University’s successful efforts to be named a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
