Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)
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Submitted by sauvik on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:52am
This proposal explores opportunities to improve cybersecurity systems by encouraging cooperation and stewardship, whereby people work together for mutually beneficial cybersecurity outcomes. For example, coworkers could provide accountability for one another in keeping their software fully up-to-date, or a trusted expert might remotely configure the security settings on a new laptop for a consenting non-expert. Many existing security systems, by contrast, are not designed to enable or encourage social interaction, a situation that often results in confusion and non-compliance.
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Submitted by vhoang on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:49am
Many real-world cryptographic schemes are based on the provable-security paradigm, certifying their security via some proof. However, in several important settings, existing proofs for the in-use constructions give weak security bounds, even to the extent that these results are not meaningful. Moreover, many proofs in the literature are buggy, giving false confidence on the security of constructions which are in fact vulnerable.
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Submitted by qinghual on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:33am
The power grid is a critical infrastructure for national security, the economy, and daily life, and faces many cybersecurity threats. A proof-of-concept attack hit the Ukraine in 2015, and cut off the power supply to hundreds of thousands of people for several hours. In many successful cyber attacks so far, security vulnerabilities in software have played an important role, exposing systems to attackers who aim to compromise and hence control the system.
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Submitted by Ioannis Savidis on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:29am
Hardware security, specifically the protection of integrated circuit intellectual property (IP), has gained importance as adversaries have the financial and experiential means to reverse engineer and replicate competitors' IP. Significant research effort has been devoted to protecting digital circuits, but the protection of analog circuits from an adversary has largely been ignored. The focus of this work is to explore techniques to enhance the security of analog circuits from attacks such as reverse engineering and cloning, both of which can lead to IP theft.
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Submitted by jannel on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:27am
Mobile devices contain a collection of personal, private, and financial information that, if accessed by an unauthorized user, has the potential to be severely compromising. Thus, it is important for mobile devices to verify whether their users are allowed to access the device and its services. We call this mobile authentication, and it is frequent, prevalent, and necessary. The need to protect data from unauthorized access is important to understand, irrespective of whether an end-user ultimately opts out of using authentication.
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Submitted by Mohammad Khan on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:20am
Prior research notes that many cyberattacks are preventable if end users take precautionary measures, such as keeping systems updated, but they often fail to do so. This proposal builds upon theories of risk communication, emotional intelligence, and self-determination to design new approaches to cybersecurity risk communication and training. The goals are to enable users to assess risks, costs, and benefits consistently and correctly, to promote task-focused coping responses, and to facilitate their internalization of values, promoting spontaneous diffusion of cybersecurity knowledge.
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Submitted by Yinqian Zhang on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:15am
Intel's Software Guard Extension (SGX) is a hardware extension available in recent Intel processors, which provides software applications with shielded execution environments, called enclaves, to protect their confidentiality and integrity against compromised operating systems. The wide adoption of SGX will foster a shielded execution paradigm for enhancing software security in situations where the operating systems are not entirely trusted, such as public clouds.
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Submitted by Daniel Wichs on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:13am
Traditionally, the main goal of cryptography has been to secure data in transit over an insecure channel, by providing the digital analogue of a "lock box" that can only be unlocked by the intended recipient but whose contents cannot be observed or manipulated by anyone else. In recent years, new technologies and applications such as the rise of cloud computing are forcing us to fundamentally change our perspective.
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Submitted by Jean Yang on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:11am
This project develops a new programming model that incorporates a theory of differential privacy. Differential privacy is a formulation of statistical privacy that protects individual data values while still allowing the release of results from privacy-preserving analyses. Prior work on language-based techniques for differential privacy has focused on preventing leaks, rejecting programs either statically, before they run, or dynamically, as they run, before they leak too much information.
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Submitted by Neil Gong on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 9:09am
The goal of this project is to make graph-based security analytics practical and robust. General-purpose graph algorithms and graph-based machine learning methods have had some success when applied to a number of security problems ranging from detecting malicious websites and compromised devices in computer networks to detecting compromised or inauthentic accounts in social networks. However, because the existing methods are designed for generic contexts rather than for specific security problems, there is room to improve their performance in detecting bad actors in networks.
