KU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary - 2020 Q1

A. Fundamental Research
The University of Kansas Lablet continued work on five projects examining resiliency, IoT and cloud privacy, preventing side channel communication, developing semantics and infrastructure for trust, and secure native binary execution. Specifically, we are: (i) developing a method to enable cloud-assisted, privacy-preserving machine learning classification over encrypted data for IoT devices; (ii) reducing micro-architectural side-channels by introducing new OS abstractions while minimally modifying micro-architecture and OS; (iii) developing an epistemology and ontology for framing resilience; (iv) formalizing the remote attestation and defining sufficiency and soundness; and (v) developing a framework for client-side security assessment and enforcement for COTS software. As described in full reports for each project we are making progress on research goals.

B. Community Engagement(s)

The COVID-19 outbreak required KU to move HoTSoS from April 7-8 2020 to September 22-23.  The conference will be held at the Burge Union on the KU campus as originally planned. We received 25 submissions for the technical session and over 20 poster abstracts.  All accepted papers were reviewed by the program committee and poster abstracts review by the program chairs.  The HoTSoS proceedings have been assembled.  Keynote presentations include: our Best Paper award winner from last year, Michael Hicks; Joshua Gutmann, MITRE, Andrew Gacik, Amazon; and Lyle Paczkowski, Sprint CTO.   We are ready for September!

The KU Lablet supported the quarterly PI meeting held in January at NCSU.  We presented our work on scalable trust focusing on our attestation manager model, an initial collection of attestation patterns for aggregating trust, and initial results modeling attestation protocol negotiation.

KU Lablet researchers Bo Luo and Fengjun Li received an NSA grant to host the 2020 GenCyber Summer Camp. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we plan to postpone the event to the summer of 2021. 

Bo Luo was invited to visit the Center for Trustworthy IoT Infrastructure at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and gave a talk on “A First Cut on IoT Security — A Cyber-Physical Perspective” on Feb 6, 2020.  Fengjun Li gave an invited talk on “Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Learning” in the Frontiers Informatics Meetup: Healthcare Data Analytics and Security, Kansas City, KS, USA, March 5, 2020.  Fengjun Li was invited to give a Professional Skill-Building Webinar on “Social Network Security & Privacy: Learning the Truth While Protecting the Sensitive” in the Spring 2020 Advisory Boards Meeting of the Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, University of Kansas, April 6, 2020.

On Feb. 27-28, we hosted the annual EECS Visitation day when our prospective MS/PhD students visisted campus. About 14 prospective students and many current graduate and undergraduate students and faculty attended the event. They were given an introduction to ITTC and our various research initiatives, including the Science of Security Lablet projects. Several Lablet faculty and aligned faculty presented their research interests and projects to the students.

John Symons presented an invited talk, The Metaphysics of Resilience, for the Semanário em Metafísica da Ciência, CFCUL at the University of Lisbon, March 9 2020 and hosted a talk by Tom Wang from Renmin University on the Confucian Critique of the Open Internet (by skype), Feb11 2020.

With our partners Syracuse University, University of Minnesota, and Case Western Reserve University we continued executing our NSF I/UCRC planning grant awarded in fall 2019.  The KU team lead by Michael Branicky and Tricia Bergman interviewed a number of companies in addition to the KU Science of Security advisory board members.  Our topic of secure, high-assurance systems is synergistic with a number of our Lablet research efforts and the I/UCRC presents an excellent technology transfer opportunity.

C. Educational Advances

Students are enrolling in our new Cyber Security certificate program.  As anticipated, all seats are taken and the waiting list is at capacity.  We will publish more on the program and how it integrates hands-on experience through cyber-competitions with traditional classroom learning.