CAREER

The production of computer chips has universally moved offshore in recent years, reducing design complexity and fabrication cost. But these benefits come at the expense of security: An attack anywhere along the supply chain can insert malicious components into an integrated circuit, pirate its design or counterfeit it. These attacks, which are exceedingly difficult to detect, jeopardize the computer industry, undermine national security, and put critical infrastructure in danger.

This project addresses the problem that, to be trustworthy yet practical, mechanisms for enforcing software security must (1) undergo rigorous analysis that provides formal security guarantees and (2) be developed quickly. The project addresses this problem by creating (1) formal, foundational theories of software security and (2) convenient tools for quickly generating provably sound enforcement mechanisms.

Multi-core architecture with 4 to 8 cores on a die is a reality today and future generations of processors are expected to contain even more cores per chip. This project targets to realize the full potential of large-scale multi-core processors as a secure and trustworthy computing substrate. First, in "many-core" processors, the availability of a large number of processing elements together with constraints on power consumption alleviates the need for heavy time-sharing of resources, which often results in various types of side-channels.

With the rapid increase in computing, storage and networking resources, data is not only collected and stored but also analyzed. This creates a serious privacy problem which often inhibits the use of this data. This project explores the problem of performing optimization analysis over distributed data without conflicting with privacy and security concerns. This is especially challenging due to the complexity and iterative nature of the solutions.

Distributed systems that allow any user to enroll his node as a participant must resolve two main challenges to achieve reliability: selecting trustworthy participants, and detecting and containing the damage of deviant nodes. This research addresses these challenges by (a) presenting a new system architecture, F2F, that incorporates decentralized trust relationships among users in determining trustworthy nodes and (b) devising new techniques to detect and contain faults of misbehaving nodes in the context of concrete applications using this new architecture.