Systems

This project studies Internet censorship using novel measurement techniques, ranging from low-level packet filtering on Internet Protocol (IP) networks to high-level censorship of social media content. Collectively these techniques can provide greater situational awareness of censorship dynamics. The project focuses on a suite of advanced inference techniques for when ?direct observation?

Organizations need to protect their computer systems from attackers. They often group their own computers into risk pools to reduce threat propagation and monitor the communication between these groups. Unfortunately, this boundary monitoring is unable to see traffic within groups and, since each monitor is segmented, they cannot form a holistic picture of the entire network. Finally, modern approaches must examine network traffic in isolation, without the ability to know what action on the originating computer caused it.

One of the most significant challenges in cybersecurity is that humans are involved in software engineering and inevitably make security mistakes in their implementation of specifications, leading to software vulnerabilities. A challenge to eliminating these mistakes is the relative lack of empirical evidence regarding what secure coding practices (e.g., secure defaults, validating client data, etc.), threat modeling, and educational solutions are effective in reducing the number of application-level vulnerabilities that software engineers produce.

The computer security community has long advocated the concept of building multiple layers of defense to protect a system. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to realize this vision in the practice of software development, and software often ships with inadequate defenses, typically developed in an ad hoc fashion.

Specialized hardware accelerators are growing in popularity across the computing spectrum from mobile devices to datacenters. These special-purpose hardware engines promise significant improvements in computing performance and energy efficiency that are essential to all aspects of modern society. However, hardware specialization also comes with added design complexity and introduces a host of new security challenges, which have not been adequately explored.