NCSU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary

A. Fundamental Research
High level report of result or partial result that helped move security science forward-- In most cases it should point to a "hard problem". These are the most important research accomplishments of the Lablet in the previous quarter.

We continued to produce science of security outcomes. The following are the major contributions from Lablet projects.

• We completed an initial prototype of Self-Patch, our self-triggering patching framework that combines light-weight runtime attack detection and dynamic targeted patching to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of security protection for containerized applications. Over a test suite of 31 real-world attacks in 23 common applications, we find that Self-Patch can accurately detect and classify 81% of the attacks and reduce patching overhead by up to 84%.
• We have identified important challenges in connected vehicles, specifically, their keyless (i.e., fob-based) entry systems and on-board diagnostic systems. We found that existing approaches expose a large threat surface that could be exploited to impersonate a vehicle owner, gain control of a vehicle, or steal private information.
• We have investigated SDKs used in mobile apps for payment services. Through formal modeling using the Tamarin Prover, we identified four vulnerabilities in these SDKs and demonstrated proof-of-concept exploits for four payment service providers. We have reported these vulnerabilities to these providers.
• We continued to engage with the security community. Specifically, we interviewed additional experts regarding cybersecurity research, having expanded the domains of expertise represented by these experts. We resumed developing a paper on good examples for cybersecurity research to help guide future researchers.

B. Community Engagement(s)
Research interaction in the community including workshops, seminars, competitions, etc.

We brought up the Science of Security in a variety of fora, including

• Presentations at and discussions with colleagues at academic conferences.
• We gave a conference tutorial that involved concepts of sociotechnical systems, norms, and privacy at (1) the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) and (2) Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI).
• Several lablet members had a discussion session with Cisco regarding upcoming challenges in cybersecurity from the standpoint of authentication that Cisco is considering addressing in new products.

C. Educational Advances
Impact to courses or curriculum at your school or elsewhere that indicates an increased training or rigor in security research.