Visible to the public KU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary - 2021 Q3Conflict Detection Enabled

A. Fundamental Research

The University of Kansas Lablet continued work on four projects targeting resiliency, preventing side channel communication, developing semantics and infrastructure for trust, and secure native binary execution. Specifically, we are: (i) reducing micro-architectural side-channels by introducing new OS abstractions while minimally modifying micro-architecture and OS; (ii) developing an epistemology and ontology for framing resilience; (iii) formalizing the remote attestation and defining sufficiency and soundness; and (iv) developing a framework for client-side security assessment and enforcement for COTS software. 

B. Community Engagement(s)

KU PIs restarted the GenCyber program for high-school educators.  GenCyber brings high school teachers to campus for a week-long intensive introduction to cyber security.  The intent is providing them hands on experiences they can take back to their classrooms.  GenCyber is supported by NSA and NSF.

John Symons completed an review article for British Journal of Philosophy of Science on Primiero’s Foundations of Computing book.

John Symons will organize a conference on miscomputation, malfunction, and error during the spring semester.   He and his colleagues will produce a journal special issue based on accepted papers in late 2022.

Perry Alexander continued supporting the High Confidence Software and Systems symposium as a member of the planning committee.

Perry Alexander and Raj Pal (NSA) began a dialog around attestation as a service for authentication in 5G networking.  We are joined by representatives of TMobile and Arm and meet biweekly.  This group has significant visibility in several standards organizations-TCG and IETF in particular-allowing us input into industrial practice.  This interaction is continuing.

KU continues our internal Software Assurance Meetup for researchers interested in high-assurance and secure systems, but are new to the area.

KU Lablet PIs continue work with MITRE, JHUAPL, and NSA to develop remote attestation approaches.  Joint work from this effort is available at https://www.copland-lang.org including the Copland Collection of utilities and tools, Copland formal semantics, and attestation manager implementations.

C. Educational Advances

KU has hired Dr. Jennifer Lohoefener a research assistant professor to focus on development of educational technologies and outreach.  This position is funded partially by our Lablet with additional support from The KU Office of Research and KU School of Engineering.  For the Lablet, Dr. Lohoefener will focus on development of course materials for integrating security and formal methods.  We anticipate initially offering this course in the Spring Semester of 2022.