Scalability and Composability

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Visible to the public Side-Channel Attack Resistance

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)--cars, airplanes, power plants, and etc.--are increasingly dependent on powerful and complex hardware for higher intelligence and functionalities. However, this complex hardware may also introduce new attack vectors--hardware side-channels--which can be exploited by attackers to steal sensitive information, to disrupt timing of time critical functions that interact with the physical plants, or to break memory protection mechanisms in modern computers.

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Visible to the public Scalable Trust Semantics & Infrastructure

Remote attestation provides a run-time capability for appraising system behavior and establishing trust. Using remote attestation, an appraiser requests evidence describing a target. The target responds by performing measurement to gather evidence then adds cryptographic signatures to assure integrity and authenticity. The appraiser takes the evidence and assesses the target's behavior to determine if the target is who and what it claims to be.

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Visible to the public Cloud-Assisted IoT Systems Privacy

The key to realizing the smart functionalities envisioned through the Internet of Things (IoT) is to securely and efficiently communicate, store, and make sense of the tremendous data generated by IoT devices. Therefore, integrating IoT with the cloud platform for its computing and big data analysis capabilities becomes increasingly important, since IoT devices are computational units with strict performance and energy constraints. However, when data is transferred among interconnected devices or to the cloud, new security and privacy issues arise.

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Visible to the public Obsidian: A Language for Secure-By-Construction Blockchain Programs

This project considers models for secure collaboration and contracts in a decentralized environment among parties that have not established trust. A significant example of this is blockchain programming, with platforms such as Ethereum and HyperLedger.

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Visible to the public Anonymous Messaging

Anonymity is a basic right and a core aspect of Internet. Recently, there has been tremendous interest in anonymity and privacy in social networks, motivated by the natural desire to share one's opinions without the fear of judgment or personal reprisal (by parents, authorities, and the public). We propose to study the fundamental questions associated with building such a semi-distributed, anonymous messaging platform, which aims to keep anonymous the identity of the source who initially posted a message as well as the identity of the relays who approved and propagated the message.

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Visible to the public Science of Human Circumvention of Security

Well-intentioned human users continually circumvent security controls. The pandemic/ubiquitous fact of this circumvention undermines the effectiveness of security designs that implicitly assume circumvention never happens. We seek to develop metrics to enable security engineers and other stakeholders to make meaningful, quantifiable comparisons, decisions, and evaluations of proposed security controls in light of what really happens when these controls are deployed.

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Visible to the public A Hypothesis Testing Framework for Network Security

This project develops a scientific approach to testing hypotheses about network security when those tests must consider layers of complex interacting policies within the network stack. The work is motivated by observation that the infrastructure of large networks is hideously complex, and so is vulnerable to various attacks on services and data. Coping with these vulnerabilities consumes significant human management time, just trying to understand the network's behavior.