Small

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Visible to the public SaTC: STARSS: Small: Domain Informed Techniques for Detecting and Defending Against Malicious Firmware

Submitted by Kevin Butler on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 10:14am

Embedded systems play a large role in our daily lives. They are found in everything from computers and consumer electronics to appliances and automobiles, and represent a market estimated to be worth almost $160 billion. Many of them, however, use inexpensive microcontrollers that cannot easily be analyzed, so it is unclear how well they operate in practice. This work seeks improve the safety and security of these systems by developing techniques to analyze their firmware, particularly with regards to the popular Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Bluetooth protocols.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: External Obliviousness in Trusted Execution Environments

Submitted by tristartom on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 10:12am

Processing personal data in "the cloud" is an increasingly common computing application. For example, health monitors collect heartbeat data and upload to cloud for personal healthcare and wellbeing. This increases privacy and data security risks. This project aims to achieve provable security in the cloud by protecting data-access patterns in a security-oriented cloud architecture built on the recently released Intel SGX (Software Guard eXtensions) processor.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Models and Measurements for Website Fingerprinting

Submitted by Nicholas Hopper on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 10:10am

Many private interactions between individuals and their friends, families, employers, and institutions are now carried out on the Internet; disclosure of the contents of these interactions or even the mere associations between these parties can expose people to real financial or physical risks. As a result, encryption and services such as virtual private networks or the Tor project that conceal the connection between a user and the websites they visit are growing in popularity.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: ForensicExaminer: Testbed for Benchmarking Digital Audio Forensic Algorithms

Submitted by Khalid Malik on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 10:08am

The proliferation of powerful smart-computing devices (e.g., smartphones, surveillance systems) capable of production, editing, analysis, and sharing of multimedia files and associated technological advances have affected almost every aspect of our lives. The use of digital multimedia (images, audio, and video) as evidence is rapidly growing in multiple applications, including legal proceedings and law enforcement.

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Visible to the public SaTC: TTP: Small: STINGAR - Deployment of highly automated, reliable, and fast cybersecurity threat response systems

Submitted by John Board on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 9:59am

Modern cybersecurity attacks are often carried out through automated "bots" or agents that systematically attack networks, at scale and in a matter of minutes. This has left organizations scrambling to respond with defenses that must first be validated or enacted by humans, and so take time to mount. Institutions can no longer afford to combat these powerful and rapid digital attacks with our slower and sometimes error-prone analog (human-based) responses.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: A Multi-Layer Learning Approach to Mobile Traffic Filtering

Submitted by Athina Markopoulou on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 9:20am

The mobile ecosystem has become an attractive target for various types of abuses. For instance, many mobile applications leak sensitive user information, such as email addresses and location, which is a privacy issue. Second, attackers routinely disguise malware in seemingly legitimate mobile apps to launch attacks, which poses security threats. Third, many mobile apps and sites push intrusive und undesirable ads, such as auto-play and pop-ups, which harm usability.

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Visible to the public SaTC: TTP: Small: Enhancing Container Security via Fine-Grained System Resource Constraints

Submitted by Kun Sun on Wed, 03/13/2019 - 9:18am

Linux containers have become a popular light-weight virtualization platform for effective on-demand computing. Their use ranges from simple high-performance computing (HPC) clusters to fully orchestrated enterprise systems. As such they have become attractive targets for attackers. This project aims at improving the trustworthiness and reliability of the Linux containers and their applications.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Side-channel Attacks Against Mobile Users: Singularity Detection, Behavior Identification, and Automated Rectification

Submitted by Guanhua Tu on Tue, 03/12/2019 - 3:39pm

Side-channel attacks have been proven effective to infer sensitive information (such as user activities) that should not be disclosed to unauthorized users. Owing to the closed nature of the cellular network infrastructure, adversaries cannot easily capture encrypted mobile network traffic, thus protecting against side-channel information leakage of mobile users.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: MOSE: Automated Detection of Module-Specific Semantic Errors

Submitted by Kangjie Lu on Tue, 03/12/2019 - 3:10pm

System software such as operating system kernels, libraries, and application frameworks provide the foundation for all of the functionality of computing devices, from personal computers and servers to mobile and embedded devices. Security vulnerabilities in system software are particularly serious because they can undermine any of the software running on a device. The most common vulnerabilities in system software are semantic errors such as missing security checks.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Number-theoretic aspects of lattice cryptology

Submitted by Stephen Miller on Tue, 03/12/2019 - 3:03pm

This award supports research in the mathematical underpinnings of cryptography. Since the late 1970s, widely-used cryptosystems have been developed based on the perceived difficulty of certain mathematical problems. New applications, as well as improvements in attacks on existing cryptosystems, call for a better understanding of these underlying mathematical problems.