Scientific Foundations

group_project

Visible to the public  CRII: SaTC: Expanding the Frontiers of Cryptographic Technologies

Submitted by Sanjam Garg on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:52pm

As all our data moves to the cloud many new security and privacy concerns arise and traditional cryptographic primitives prove insufficient in such scenarios. A key focus of this research is to advance the state of the art on cryptographic techniques that address these new challenges.

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

Visible to the public TWC: Medium: CRYPTOGRAPHIC APPLICATIONS OF CAPACITY THEORY

Submitted by Nadia Heninger on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:47pm

The primary goal of this project is to develop a mathematical foundation underlying the analysis of modern cryptosystems. Cryptography is a core tool used to secure communications over the Internet. Secure and trustworthy communications and data storage are essential to national security and to the functioning of the world economy. Recent spectacular research results have enabled the development of new types of cryptography, exciting new potential applications, and hopes for stronger guarantees of cryptographic security in the long term.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC SBE: Small: Collaborative: Brain Password: Exploring A Psychophysiological Approach for Secure User Authentication

Submitted by Zhanpeng Jin on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:41pm

Cryptographic systems often rely on the secrecy of cryptographic credentials; however, these are vulnerable to eavesdropping and can resist neither a user's intentional disclosure nor coercion attacks where the user is forced to reveal the credentials. Conventional biometric keys (e.g., fingerprint, iris, etc.), unfortunately, can still be surreptitiously duplicated or adversely revealed. In this research, the PIs argue that the most secure cryptographic credentials are ones of which the users aren't even aware.

group_project

Visible to the public SBE: Small: Statistical Models and Methods for Dynamic Complex Networks

Submitted by Harry Crane on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:13pm

The project examines the structure and function of dynamic networks by formulating and analyzing probabilistic models for temporally evolving networks and processes occurring on them. In addition, the project seeks practical and efficient statistical methods for network inference. The project is primarily motivated by national security concerns surrounding counter-terrorism and cybersecurity, but outcomes should be directly relevant in biological, social, and physical science applications as well as mathematical areas of probability theory, combinatorics, and graph theory.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Understanding Anti-Analysis Defenses in Malicious Code

Submitted by debray on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:11pm

The problem of cyber-security encompasses computer systems of all sizes and affects almost all aspects of our day-to-day lives. This makes it fundamentally important to detect accurately and respond quickly to cyber-threats as they develop. This project aims to develop techniques and tools that can accelerate the process of understanding and responding to new cyber-threats as they develop. The authors of malicious software (malware) usually try to make the malware stealthy in order to avoid detection.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: EVADE: Evidence-Assisted Detection and Elimination of Security Vulnerabilities

Submitted by Timothy Wood on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:09pm

Today's software remains vulnerable to attack. Despite decades of advances in areas ranging from testing to static analysis and verification, all large real-world software is deployed with errors. Because this software is either written in or underpinned by unsafe languages, errors often translate to security vulnerabilities. Although techniques exist that could prevent or limit the risk of exploits, high performance overhead blocks their adoption, leaving today's systems open to attack.

group_project

Visible to the public STARSS: Small: Self-reliant Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Submitted by William Harris on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:04pm

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are hardware circuits that can be reconfigured by a system user after being deployed. FPGAs are a compelling alternative architecture that may allow hardware performance to continue to improve at a dramatic rate. Unfortunately, systems that incorporate an FPGA may allow a potentially untrusted user to reprogram hardware after it has been deployed. Such a scenario enables novel security attacks that can leak a user's private information or corrupt critical information stored on a system, but are performed entirely in hardware.

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

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Understanding the Complexity of Concurrent Security

Submitted by Muthuramakrishn V... on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:02pm

A key property of modern day network environments such as the Internet is the possibility of multiple processes running simultaneously, concurrently and unaware of each other. However, the same property also allows an attacker for a coordinated attack in which an adversary controls many parties, interleaving the executions of the various protocol instances and creating rogue interactions between protocols. With changing network environments and new-emerging paradigms such as cloud computing, we need to assess the threat model in order to capture a broader class of attacks.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Communication under Adversarial Attacks in Complex Networks - Fundamental Limits and Secure Coding Strategies

Submitted by Joerg Kliewer on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 2:00pm

Today's world is highly dependent on the integrity of communication systems as the Internet, WiFi, or cellular networks. As networks become more pervasive, they are increasingly being used for communication and storage of critical as well as sensitive data and therefore impose more stringent demands on reliability and security, which must be maintained even under extreme settings such as partial power failures, natural disasters, or, most importantly, adversarial attacks.

group_project

Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Practical Security Protocols via Advanced Data Structures

Submitted by cpap on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 1:42pm

Data structures have a prominent modern computational role, due to their wide applicability, such as in database querying, web searching, and social network analysis. This project focuses on the interplay of data structures with security protocols, examining two different paradigms: the security for data structures paradigm (SD) and the data structures for security paradigm (DS).