Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Author is Levy, Amit  [Clear All Filters]
2019-10-30
Hong, James, Levy, Amit, Riliskis, Laurynas, Levis, Philip.  2018.  Don't Talk Unless I Say So! Securing the Internet of Things with Default-Off Networking. 2018 IEEE/ACM Third International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI). :117-128.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way we interact with everyday objects. "Smart" devices will reduce energy use, keep our homes safe, and improve our health. However, as recent attacks have shown, these devices also create tremendous security vulnerabilities in our computing networks. Securing all of these devices is a daunting task. In this paper, we argue that IoT device communications should be default-off and desired network communications must be explicitly enabled. Unlike traditional networked applications or devices like a web browser or PC, IoT applications and devices serve narrowly defined purposes and do not require access to all services in the network. Our proposal, Bark, a policy language and runtime for specifying and enforcing minimal access permissions in IoT networks, exploits this fact. Bark phrases access control policies in terms of natural questions (who, what, where, when, and how) and transforms them into transparently enforceable rules for IoT application protocols. Bark can express detailed rules such as "Let the lights see the luminosity of the bedroom sensor at any time" and "Let a device at my front door, if I approve it, unlock my smart lock for 30 seconds" in a way that is presentable and explainable to users. We implement Bark for Wi-Fi/IP and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks and evaluate its efficacy on several example applications and attacks.

2019-01-16
Ayers, Hudson, Crews, Paul Thomas, Teo, Hubert Hua Kian, McAvity, Conor, Levy, Amit, Levis, Philip.  2018.  Design Considerations for Low Power Internet Protocols. Proceedings of the 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. :317–318.
Examining implementations of the 6LoWPAN Internet Standard in major embedded operating systems, we observe that they do not fully interoperate. We find this is due to some inherent design flaws in 6LoWPAN. We propose and demonstrate four principles that can be used to structure protocols for low power devices that encourage interoperability between diverse implementations.
2018-05-09
Levy, Amit, Campbell, Bradford, Ghena, Branden, Pannuto, Pat, Dutta, Prabal, Levis, Philip.  2017.  The Case for Writing a Kernel in Rust. Proceedings of the 8th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems. :1:1–1:7.

An operating system kernel written in the Rust language would have extremely fine-grained isolation boundaries, have no memory leaks, and be safe from a wide range of security threats and memory bugs. Previous efforts towards this end concluded that writing a kernel requires changing Rust. This paper reaches a different conclusion, that no changes to Rust are needed and a kernel can be implemented with a very small amount of unsafe code. It describes how three sample kernel mechanisms–-DMA, USB, and buffer caches–-can be built using these abstractions.