KU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary - 2020 Q3

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)

The KU Science of Security Lablet hosted the Hot Topics in The Science of Security (HoTSoS’20) conference online September 22-24.  Perry Alexander (KU) served as General Chair with Drew Davidson (KU) and Baek-Young Choi (UMKC) served as Program Co-Chairs.     Katie Dey (Vanderbilt) provided outstanding logistical support while Heather Lucas (NSA) and Adam Tagert (NSA) provided assistance throughout conference planning and execution.  Over 350 individuals registered for the conference. We hosted 4 excellent Keynote presentations including: the Best Paper award winner from last year, Michael Hicks, University of Maryland; Joshua Gutmann, MITRE, Andrew Gacik, Amazon; and Lyle Paczkowski, T-Mobile CTO.  We had 12 traditional papers, 20 posters and six Works in Progress papers presented.  The Works in Progress papers are a special feature of HoTSoS that allow researchers to present preliminary results prior to formal publication.  We saw this collection of papers grow from 2 to 6 this year and anticipate WIP papers becoming a tradition a future HoTSoS conferences.  Next year’s conference will be sponsored by NSA with Adam Tagert serving as General Chair.

John Symons and his colleagues Ramón Alvarado (University of Oregon) and Kamuran Osmanoglu (Koç University) continued their international conference series on data privacy.     Presentations this quarter include:

• Reid Blackman, PhD - What is data ethics and what can it do?
• Tom (Xiaowei) Wang, Renmin University of China - The Confucian and the Californian ideology: contrasting approaches to the development of the internet and their role in the growth of a data economy.
• Ramon Alvarez, University of Oregon and John Symons, University of Kansas - Epistemic Injustice in Data Ethics: identifying the harms particular to data science.

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.  We are in the process of finalizing industrial partners for the proposal submission in December.  The topic of the Center will be High-Assurance and Secure Systems with numerous researchers and advisory board participants from the KU Lablet.

The KU Science of Security Advisory Board is planning a December virtual meeting.  Discussion topics include Lablet research projects and outreach related to security in the Kansas City region.

KU is sharing technology with Missouri University of Science & Technology in support of the Kansas City National Security Campus, a DoE research and development facility in Kansas City.  We are integrating our remote attestation capabilities with their IoT blockchain to facilitate strong identity and secure information exchange in a model-based manufacturing environment.

Lablet researchers Fengjun Li and Bo Luo continue to plan for summer education engagements for secondary school teachers.  Unfortunately the current pandemic will dictate whether such engagements are possible. 
 

C. Educational Advances

N/A