CRII

Automated calls (often called "robocalls"), which may range in purpose from telemarketing to outright fraud, have reached epidemic proportions. While some robocalls are societally useful, there are plenty that are used for malicious purposes. This is particularly concerning because some scam calls steal millions of dollars annually, often from vulnerable populations including the elderly and recent immigrants. Policy mechanisms like the National Do Not Call Registry have failed to meaningfully stop these calls.

In mobile devices, authentication protocols are used to ensure that users' intentions are communicated untampered to the applications' backend servers. Unfortunately, traditional authentication protocols do not defend against "root-attackers," i.e., attackers able to fully compromise the main operating system of a victim's device. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), specific hardware components available in modern mobile devices, can be used to mitigate this threat, since they run a separate, smaller codebase than the main operating system.

Increasingly medical devices are dependent on software and the wireless channel for their operations, which also pose new vulnerabilities to their safe, dependable, and trustworthy operations. Medical devices such as implantable insulin pumps, which are in wide use today, continuously monitor and manage a patient's diabetes without the need for frequent daily patient interventions. These devices, not originally designed against cyber security threats, must now mitigate these threats.

Crucial and critical needs of security and trust requirements are growing in all classes of applications such as in automobiles and for wearable devices. Traditional cryptographic primitives are computation-intensive and rely on secrecy of shared or session keys, applicable on large systems like servers and secure databases. This is unsuitable for embedded devices with fewer resources for realizing sufficiently strong security. This research addresses new hardware-oriented capabilities and mechanisms for protecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Security breaches in computing systems cost billions of dollars in economic damages every year, and the intangible destructive consequences left by malicious attacks are inestimable. Meanwhile, near-threshold computing (NTC) emerges as a promising solution to improve energy efficiency by reducing the supply voltage, making it attractive for a broad range of applications from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to cloud computing facilities. With the anticipated adoption of NTC in mainstream computing systems, security vulnerabilities that are unique to NTC will be ripe for exploitation.