Scientific Foundations

Physical side channels pose a big threat to the security of embedded hardware. The differential power analysis (DPA) attack is a well known side channel threat which exploits the linear dependence of the power on the secret data or an intermediate value correlated to the secret data through statistical model building. This project addresses the DPA vulnerability by deploying a technology cell library consisting of private gates. The technique developed will make embedded hardware less vulnerable to side-channel attacks, thereby securing private user data and transactions.

Publicly available and searchable genomic data banks could revolutionize clinical and research settings, but privacy concerns about releasing such information are currently preventing its usage. This project aims to address these concerns by providing new mechanisms by which individuals can donate their genomic information to a data bank in such a way that third parties, such as doctors or researchers, querying the data bank are guaranteed to learn only aggregate functions of the population's data that the individuals authorize.

Large-scale Internet censorship prevents citizens of many parts of the world from accessing vast amounts of otherwise publicly available information. The recognition and publication of these censorship events have aided in motivating the development of new privacy-enhancing technologies to circumvent the censor. We argue that as circumvention technologies improve and the cost of detecting their use increases, adversaries that are intent on restricting access to information will seek out alternative techniques for disruption.

Industrial control systems differ significantly from standard, general-purpose computing environments, and they face quite different security challenges. With physical "air gaps" now the exception, our critical infrastructure has become vulnerable to a broad range of potential attackers. In this project we develop novel network monitoring approaches that can detect sophisticated semantic attacks: malicious actions that drive a process into an unsafe state without however exhibiting any obvious protocol-level red flags.

Modern critical infrastructure relies on successful interdependent function among many different types of networks. For example, the Internet depends on access to the power grid, which in turn depends on the power-grid communication network and the energy production network. For this reason, network science researchers have begun examining the robustness of critical infrastructure as a network of networks, or a multilayer network. Research in network anomaly detection systems has focused on single network structures (specifically, the Internet as a single network).