Cryptography, applied

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Subversion-Resistant Cryptography

Submitted by Mihir Bellare on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 4:12pm

This work aims to effectively address security concerns while maintaining the privacy of individuals and corporations. The project analyzes subversive attacks, develops defenses and deterrents, creates privacy tools and software, and increases awareness and expertise through teaching, mentoring and involvement of students in research.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Scaling proof-based verifiable computation

Submitted by Michael Walfish on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 1:15pm

This research addresses a fundamental problem in systems security: how can a machine specify a computation to another one and then, without executing the computation, check that the other machine carried it out correctly? Over the last several years, a new approach to this problem has emerged, based on refining cryptographic and theoretical tools, and incorporating them into built systems. However, despite exciting advances, the resulting systems are still not practical in the normal sense.

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Visible to the public TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing

Submitted by reiter on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 12:29pm

There are at least two key features of the move to cloud computing that introduce the opportunity for significant leaps forward in computer security for tenant services. First, a compute cloud provides a common software, hardware and management basis for rolling out cross-cutting services en masse that have resisted incremental deployment in a one-service-at-a-time fashion. Second, compute clouds offer providers a broad view of activity across an unprecedented diversity of tenant services.

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Visible to the public CAREER: The Theoretical Foundations of Symmetric Cryptography

Submitted by Stefano Tessaro on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 3:01pm

Cryptography is essential to ensure confidentiality and integrity of information. Due to their practicality, symmetric algorithms where the same secret key is used by the sender and the recipient underlie most practical deployments of cryptographic techniques. However, also as a result of this, symmetric cryptography suffers from an inherent tension between real world efficiency demands and provable security guarantees. This project investigates new technical advances aimed at narrowing the gap between provable security and the practical demands of symmetric cryptography.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Physiological Information Leakage: A New Front on Health Information Security

Submitted by Niraj Jha on Thu, 08/17/2017 - 9:46pm

With the growing use of implantable and wearable medical devices, information security for such devices has become a major concern. Prior work in this area mostly focuses on attacks on the wireless communication channel among these devices and health data stored in online databases. The proposed work is a departure from this line of research and is motivated by acoustic and electromagnetic physiological information leakage from the medical devices. This type of information leakage can also directly occur from the human body, thus raising privacy concerns.

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Visible to the public STARSS: Small: Side-Channel Analysis and Resiliency Targeting Accelerators

Submitted by David Kaeli on Thu, 08/17/2017 - 9:38pm

The design of social media interfaces greatly shapes how much, and when, people decide to reveal private information. For example, a designer can highlight a new system feature (e.g., your travel history displayed on a map) and show which friends are using this new addition. By making it seem as if sharing is the norm -- after all, your friends are doing it -- the designer signals to the end-user that he can and should participate and share information.