America has a trust problem. Pew Research reports that 79% of Americans are concerned about how companies use their data, 81% percent believe that privacy risks outweigh the benefits of cloud-based services, and half have decided to stop using a product or service because of privacy concerns. The alarm is understandable when account logins are not 100% secure. Although a password is encrypted to prevent the password from being compromised during transmission, the digital key that unscrambles the password can be stored by a remote server, which leaves the account vulnerable to a hack. What if there was a way to log in and prove ownership of an account without ever typing the password? This would be the ultimate level of privacy and security. And what if that method could be extended to protecting other data online, creating a guarantee that data would not be compromised? David Wu, Anita Jones Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia School of Engineering, has earned a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance mathematical models that could make such secure transactions possible.