Systems

The goal of our work is to (a) capture people's expectations and surprises in using mobile apps in a scalable manner, and to (b) summarize these perceptions in a simple format to help people make better trust decisions. Our main idea is analyzing privacy in the form of people's expectations about what an app will and won't do, focusing on where an app breaks people's expectations. We are building an App Scanner that combines automated scanning techniques with crowdsourcing.

To lower costs and improve outcomes in current medical practice we need integrated interoperable medical systems to provide machine-assisted care, interaction detection, and improved alarm accuracy, to name just a few uses. This project is developing both the theory and practice to ensure the safety of next-generation medical devices by allowing secure coordination and composition, in facilities as small as a local doctor's office or as large as a multi-campus hospital.

Software bugs and vulnerabilities are primary causes for cyber-security breaches in today's society. Runtime monitoring, a technique to enforce safety and security properties at program execution time, is essential to detect intrusions and keep the system healthy. One of the main obstacles to adopt runtime monitoring techniques in practice is high performance overhead. Inlined security monitoring enforcement often delays and blocks the execution of protected programs.

Mobile browsers are beginning to serve as critical enablers of modern computing. With a combination of rich features that rival their desktop counterparts and strong security mechanisms such as TLS/SSL, these mobile browsers are becoming the basis of many other mobile apps. Unfortunately, the security guarantees provided by mobile browsers and the risks associated with today?s mobile web have not been evaluated in great detail.

Cloud computing offers many benefits to users, including increased availability and flexibility of resources, and efficiency of equipment. However, privacy concerns are becoming a major barrier to users transitioning to cloud computing. The privilege design of existing cloud platforms creates great challenges in ensuring the trustworthiness of cloud by granting too much power to the cloud administrators, who could launch serious insider attacks by abusing the administrative privileges.