KU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary - 2020 Q2

A. Fundamental Research

The University of Kansas Lablet continued work on five projects on resiliency, IoT and cloud privacy, preventing side channel communication, and developing semantics and infrastructure for trust and initiated a fifth project on 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. 

B. Community Engagement(s)

After moving HoTSoS to September 22-23 last quarter we have made the decision to take the conference fully online.  We have extended the conference to run over three days, September 22-24.  Talks will be recorded and presented in a traditional conference format with time for questions after each presentation.  Keynote presentations have not changed and include: our Best Paper award winner from last year, Michael Hicks; Joshua Gutmann, MITRE, Andrew Gacik, Amazon; and Lyle Paczkowski, T-Mobile CTO.  One benefit of going online is a significant increase in registrants.  We hope this translates into a large audience for HoTSoS papers.

John Symons and his colleagues Ramón Alvarado (University of Oregon) and Kamuran Osmanoglu (Koç University) have organized a 6 month seminar series on Data Ethics that covers several Science of Security topics in privacy and resiliency.  The webinar is free and open to all.

With our partners Syracuse University, University of Minnesota, Case Western Reserve University, and Indiana University we continued executing our NSF I/UCRC planning grant awarded in fall 2019.  Over 150 companies were interviewed to gauge interest in participation including all members of the KU SoS Industry Advisory Board.  A full proposal will be submitted this December.

Dr. Perry Alexander met with Kansas Department of Commerce representatives to discuss the KU Lablet and its contribution to the local economy and workforce development.  Further engagements are planned.

KU is discussing a coordinated technology exchange with Missouri University of Science & Technology to support the Kansas City National Security Campus.

Dr. Perry Alexander supported the CVKey development effort by providing analysis of their privacy protocols.  CVKey is an application developed by a non-profit corporation to check health status prior to event or building admission.  Techniques developed for analyzing attestation protocols were used to informally vet the iPhone/Android application.

The KU SoS Advisory Board missed its planned April meeting due to Covid concerns.  We are now planning a virtual meeting in conjunction with HoTSoS’20.  Topics of discussion will include technology transfer and workforce development issues.  Note that Lyle Paczkowski from T-Mobile (was Sprint) is one of our HoTSoS keynotes.

C. Educational Advances

We are preparing for our first full academic year supporting the cyber-security certificate.  Even with Covid uncertainties, the program remains at capacity.