CAREER

Internet of Things (IoT) is a heterogeneous system comprising interrelated smart-objects, sensors and actuators. IoT systems are expected to ultimately usher significant advances in critical domains such as transportation, energy, and healthcare. Due to IoTs' pervasiveness and impact on the cyber-physical world, it is a vital requirement to guarantee their security. In particular, authentication is one of the most fundamental security services required for any viable IoT, since it is necessary to establish trust and secure the communication among parties in a network.

The Internet was not designed with information controls, such as censorship or surveillance, in mind. However, its importance has led many nations to repurpose Internet protocols (e.g., the Domain Name System (DNS) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)), and network management products (e.g., Web proxies, traffic shapers) for information control. This unintended use of networking technologies can lead to unintended international impact of censorship, and raises many ethical issues when network management products are exported to countries that use them to violate human rights.

Users of software are all too familiar with its shortcomings: software is slow, software is buggy and software is insecure. When a complex software system fails, it is unhelpfully simplistic to blame the implementors of the system as incompetent. The truth is that software engineers are uniquely disadvantaged among the traditional engineering disciplines because they lack a viable predictive model for the systems they design and build.

This project explores an integrative approach to embedded hardware security, where efficient design solutions complement appropriate test/validation steps and security analysis. It creates technology to protect embedded systems at different stages of life-cycle against hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy and reverse engineering, hardware Trojan attacks in untrusted design and fabrication facilities, and malicious modifications of hardware IP.

Programming languages research has many techniques for generating efficient, correct implementations from high-level specifications. Recent research on language-based security formulates models of information security in terms of modular, algebraic structures from language semantics. This research combines these threads in novel ways to construct high-assurance secure systems in which techniques from programming language semantics provide both a mathematical basis for formal verification and a flexible, modular organizing principle for system design and implementation.