Visible to the public SoS Quarterly Summary Report - October 2016Conflict Detection Enabled

Submitted by awhitesell on Fri, 10/07/2016 - 4:03pm

Lablet Summary Report
Purpose: To highlight progress. Information is generally at a higher level which is accessible to the interested public.

A). Fundamental Research
High level report of result or partial result that helped move security science foward-- In most cases it should point to a "hard problem".

[Xie, Blythe, Koppel, Smith] We have begun collaboration with researchers at University of Pennsylvania who specialize in simulating and checking Markov chain models. The goal is to blend these Markov-based models with our DASH model to tackle security problems.

[Godfrey, Caesar, Nicol, Sanders, Jin] We continue to investigate effective evaluation methodologies designed scale to large and complex systems via the marriage of emulation and simulation. We developed a hybrid platform, named DSSnet, with the goal of realizing the network models and the evaluating the verification algorithms we developed earlier. We are currently in the process of open-sourcing the DSSNet software. We also refined the existing virtual time mechanism for better synchronization between the two systems to achieve better fidelity. The research outcome includes an accepted journal paper in Journal of Simulation.

[Iyer, Kalbarczyk] Analysis of new credential stealing and infrastructure abuse attacks targeting Blue Waters, a petascale supercomputer hosted at NCSA. Data on these attacks were used to update our factor graph model. Specifically, we collected new set of security-related events that we used to create new factor functions in the factor graph model employed by the AttackTagger so to cover these recent attacks.

[Mitra, Dullerud, Chaudhuri] .We have formulated the general problem of controller synthesis in the presence of resource constrained adversaries; namely, given an adversary of a certain classification, parametrized according to the resources available to the adversary, we are creating a methodology to assess the performance degradation from this threat class. We have developed a sound and complete algorithm for solving this problem, initially for the special case of linear systems with L2-norm bounded adversaries, and now for more general nonlinear models.

[Viswanath] We have initiated a study of anonymity of the BitCoin networking stack. The networking architecture of BitCoin P2P (peer to peer), since distributed architectures are the basic essence of the anonymity provided by the cryptocurrency. However, very recent works point out the loopholes in the networking protocols -- and our work has focused on a systematic exploration of this phenomenon.

B). Community Interaction
Work to explain or extend scientific rigor in the community/culture. Workshops, Seminars, Competitions, etc.

  • Geir Dullerud, "Operators and Feedback Control Theory: Linear Switched Systems"36th International Workshop on Operator Theory and Applications (IWOTA 2016), July 18-22, 2016.
  • Jim Blythe, Vijay Kothari, Ross Koppel, and Sean Smith, "Modeling Human Security Behavior: Recent Results on Understanding Compliance" SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Ross Koppel, Jim Blythe, Vijay Kothari, and Sean Smith, "Beliefs about Cybersecurity Rules and Passwords: A Comparison of Two Survey Samples of Cybersecurity Professionals Versus Regular Users" SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Sean Smith, Ross Koppel, Jim Blythe, and Vijay Kothari, "Reasons for Cybersecurity Circumvention: A Study and a Model" SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27. 2016.
  • Wing Lam, Dengfeng Li, Wei Yang, and Tao Xie, "User-Centric Mobile Security Assessment" SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Brighten Godfrey, Matthew Caesar, David Nicol, and William Sanders, "A Hypothesis Testing Framework for Network Security", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Zachary Estrada, Phuong Cao, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer, "Detection of Malicious Keyloggers in Virtual Desktop Environments", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Hui Lin, Homa Alemzadeh, Daniel Chen, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and Ravishankar Iyer, "Safety-critical Cyber-physical Attacks: Analysis, Detection, and Mitigation", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Zhenqi Huang, Chuchu Fan, Alexandru Mereacre, Sayan Mitra and Marta Kwiatkoska, "Automatic Safety Verification of Implantable Medical Devices", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Yu Wang, Zhenqi Huang, Sayan Mitra, and Geir Dullerud, "Differentially Private and Efficient Sequential Learning Algorithms", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Peter Kairouz, Sewoong Oh, Kannan Ramchandran, Giulia Fanti, and Pramod Viswanath, "Metadata Conscious Anonymous Messaging", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Ken Keefe and William H. Sanders, "ADVISE - Adversary View Security Evaluation: Practical Metrics for Enterprise Security Engineering", SoS Quarter Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • John C. Mace, Nipun Thekkummal, and Aad van Moorsel, "Sensitivity Analysis of Probabilistic Workflow Models with Security Constraints", SoS Quarterly Meeting poster session, July 27, 2016.
  • Bill Sanders, "A Quantitative Methodology for Security Monitor Deployment", SoS Quarterly Meeting technical talk, July 27, 2016.
  • Quentin Mayo and Tao Xie, "OpenSSL: Diving Deeper in Vulnerability Causing Patterns and Reporting Practices using Static Analysis", SoS Sumer Intern Poster Session, July 29, 2016.
  • Abhiram Kothapalli, Andrew Miller, Nikita Borisov, "Smart TRB: An Incentive Compatible Consensus Protocol Utilizing Smart Contracts", SoS Sumer Intern Poster Session, July 29, 2016.
  • Andrew Marturano and Masooda Bashir, "Exploring the Human Aspect of Computer Security: A Review of Literature", SoS Sumer Intern Poster Session, July 29, 2016.
  • Esther M. Amullen, Hui Lin, and Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, "Multi-Agent System for Detecting False Data Injection Attacks Against the Power Grid", SoS Summer Inter Poster Session, July 29, 2016.
  • Kelly Greeling, Alex Withers, and Masooda Bashir, "Intrusion Detection: Separating the Human form the Program", SoS Sumer Intern Poster Session, July 29, 2016.
  • Kevin Jin, "Uncertainty-Aware Network Verification in Software-Defined Networks," gave an invited seminar, Fermi Lab Comp Tech Seminar, August 2016.
  • Key-whan Chung, "An Indirect Attack on Computing Infrastructure through Targeted Alteration on Environmental Control", Assured Cloud Computing Weekly Research Seminar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, September 28, 2016.


C. Educational
Any changes to curriculum at your school or elsewhere that indicates an increased training or rigor in security research.

[Godfrey, Caesar, Nicol, Sanders Jin] Our Coursera online course on Cloud Networking is about to re-launch in a new continuous operation mode on October 24, 2016. When this was taught last fall, roughly 30,000 students enrolled. This course included a segment on network security for the cloud, particularly with respect to network virtualization.

[Viswanath] A set of notes summarizing the Bit Coin networking protocols is being developed, with the goal of using them in an upcoming privacy and anonymity course at the graduate level.

[UIUC SoS Lablet] Five students have completed research projects as part of the SoS Summer Internship Program that ended on July 29. Each student presented a poster on the last day of the internship. The students came from Tennessee State University, North Texas University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They also attended seminars on other educational topics in conjunction with other internship programs within the UIUC College of Engineering.

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