Software

With the advancement of technologies, networked devices become ubiquitous in the society. Such devices are not limited to traditional computers and smart phones, but are increasingly extended to cover a wide variety of embedded systems (ES), such as sensors monitoring bridges, electronics controlling the operation of automobiles and industrial equipment, home medicine devices that are constantly reporting patient health information to doctors.

The proliferation and increasing sophistication of censorship warrants continuing efforts to develop tools to evade it. Yet, designing effective mechanisms for censorship resistance ultimately depends on accurate models of the capabilities of censors, as well as how those capabilities will likely evolve. In contrast to more established disciplines within security, censorship resistance is relatively nascent, not yet having solid foundations for understanding censor capabilities or evaluating the effectiveness of evasion technologies.

One of the main obstacles in providing extensive hands-on experience in cybersecurity classes is the substantial amount of manual work involved in creating and grading the exercise. Combined with the frequent need to update the exercises, this obstacle effectively limits that amount of hands-on work that gets incorporated into cybersecurity education. This project seeks to eliminate such barriers, and to greatly improve the efficiency of the educational process by automating the most time-consuming tasks.

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.

Critical errors in widely used software are discovered almost every day. They currently leave users of that software vulnerable to cyber attacks until the manufacturer eventually supplies a fix - sometimes this takes unacceptably long. There currently is no way that users of commercial off-the-shelf software that is distributed as binary code can go and fix such vulnerabilities themselves, ex post facto, because software is not easily changeable once it has been compiled to binary form. This research project investigates techniques for enabling consumer-side rewriting of binary software.