Systems

The Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a new technology introduced to make secure and trustworthy computing in a hostile environment practical. However, SGX is merely just a set of instructions. Its software support that includes the OS support, toolchain and libraries, is currently developed in a closed manner, limiting its impact only within the boundary of big companies such as Intel and Microsoft. Meanwhile, SGX does not automatically secure everything and it still faces various attacks such as controlled-side channel and enclave memory corruption.

This research project studies security and privacy for wearable devices. Wearable computing is poised to become widely deployed throughout society. These devices offer many benefits to end users in terms of realtime access to information and the augmentation of human memory, but they are also likely to introduce new and complex privacy and security problems. People who use wearable devices need assurances that their privacy will be respected, and we also need ways to minimize the potential for wearable devices to intrude on the privacy of bystanders and others.

More and more objects used in daily life have Internet connectivity, creating an "Internet of Things" (IoT). Computer security and privacy for an IoT ecosystem are fundamentally important because security breaches can cause real and significant harm to people, their homes, and their community.

Modern web and mobile applications increasingly rely on code and services from multiple parties, including services that provide security-critical functions like authentication, payments, and sharing. Developers often make mistakes in integrating these services into their applications that lead to serious security vulnerabilities. These integration failures are mainly due to failures to understand and ensure assumptions necessary for secure use of the external service.

In the last ten years virtual machines (VMs) have been extensively used for security-related applications, such as intrusion detection systems, malicious software (malware) analyzers and secure logging and replay of system execution. A VM is high-level software designed to emulate a computer's hardware. In the traditional usage model, security solutions are placed in a VM layer, which has complete control of the system resources. The guest operating system (OS) is considered to be easily compromised by malware and runs unaware of virtualization.