Systems

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Visible to the public CRII: SaTC: Analyzing and verifying the security of TCP stacks under multi-entity interactions

Submitted by Zhiyun Qian on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 1:10pm

The objective of this project is to strengthen the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a ubiquitous core Internet protocol, under emerging threat models to make it robust and secure enough to serve the needs of 'smart' technologies in communications, automobiles, medical devices, and other devices that touch our lives every day. It is terrifying to imagine that a smart car could fail to report an accident automatically due to a denial of service attack on its TCP connections, or a smart medical device could fail to report a patient's change in condition.

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

Submitted by Michael Walfish on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 12:15pm

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 Michael Swift on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 11:45am

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

Submitted by reiter on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 11:29am

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 TWC: TTP Option: Medium: Collaborative: ENCORE - ENhanced program protection through COmpiler-REwriter cooperation

Submitted by franz on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 9:49am

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.

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: TTP Option: Medium: Collaborative: EPICA: Empowering People to Overcome Information Controls and Attacks

Submitted by Michael Bailey on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 9:37am

This project studies the security of representative personalized services, such as search engines, news aggregators, and on-line targeted advertising, and identifies vulnerabilities in service components that can be exploited by pollution attacks to deliver contents intended by attackers.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Large: Collaborative: Internet-Wide Vulnerability Measurement, Assessment, and Notification

Submitted by Michael Bailey on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 9:34am

This project aims to reduce the impact of software vulnerabilities in Internet-connected systems by developing data-driven techniques for vulnerability measurement, assessment, and notification. Recent advances in Internet-wide scanning make it possible to conduct network surveys of the full public IPv4 address space in minutes.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Small: Collaborative: Enhancing Anonymity Network Resilience against Pervasive Internet Attacks

Submitted by msherr on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 9:21am

Access to publicly available information can be disrupted by various techniques, and alternative disruptive techniques continue to be developed. Understanding these alternative disruption techniques and how they affect network anonymity, privacy, and performance is paramount not only to the successful design of future technologies, but also to the security of existing networks and systems.

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Visible to the public CAREER: Towards Trustworthy Operating Systems

Submitted by Zhi Wang on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 2:12pm

An operating system is the key software of a computer system that manages the hardware and software resources and provides essential services to computer programs. It plays a critical role in the security of the whole system. Unfortunately, modern operating systems are often bloated with millions of lines of source code, and serious vulnerabilities are routinely being discovered and exploited from them.

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Visible to the public CAREER: Secure OS Views for Modern Computing Platforms

Submitted by enck on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 1:58pm

The security architecture of consumer operating systems is currently undergoing a fundamental change. In platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows 8, each application is a separate security principal that can own data. While this distinction is a vast improvement over traditional user-focused security architectures, sharing data between applications results in an unexpected loss of control of that data, potentially exposing security and privacy sensitive information.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...