Scientific Foundations

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Visible to the public STARSS: Small: Simulation-Based Verification of EM Side-Channel Attack Resilience of Embedded Cryptographic Systems

Submitted by Michael Orshansky on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 12:23pm

The widely used encryption algorithms, based both on private- and public-key cryptography, provide provable security guarantees against attacks under an abstract model of computation. In reality, physical systems leak information and the adversarial access is not completely captured by the abstractions in the standard model. Attacks that exploit a physically observable signal, such as power, timing, or electromagnetic (EM) radiation, are known as side-channel attacks. They present a formidable challenge to ensuring the security of existing cryptographic applications.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Privacy-Preserving Distributed Storage and Computation

Submitted by Michael Goodrich on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 10:51am

This project aims at developing efficient methods for protecting the privacy of computations on outsourced data in distributed settings. The project addresses the design of an outsourced storage framework where the access pattern observed by the storage server gives no information about the actual data accessed by the client and cannot be correlated with external events. For example, the server cannot determine whether a certain item was previously accessed by the client or whether a certain algorithm is being executed.

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: TTP Option: Medium: Collaborative: EPICA: Empowering People to Overcome Information Controls and Attacks

Submitted by Michael Bailey on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 10:37am

This project studies the security of representative personalized services, such as search engines, news aggregators, and on-line targeted advertising, and identifies vulnerabilities in service components that can be exploited by pollution attacks to deliver contents intended by attackers.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Large: Collaborative: Internet-Wide Vulnerability Measurement, Assessment, and Notification

Submitted by Michael Bailey on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 10:34am

This project aims to reduce the impact of software vulnerabilities in Internet-connected systems by developing data-driven techniques for vulnerability measurement, assessment, and notification. Recent advances in Internet-wide scanning make it possible to conduct network surveys of the full public IPv4 address space in minutes.

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Visible to the public TWC: TTP Option: Small: Collaborative: Enhancing Anonymity Network Resilience against Pervasive Internet Attacks

Submitted by msherr on Mon, 10/09/2017 - 10:21am

Access to publicly available information can be disrupted by various techniques, and alternative disruptive techniques continue to be developed. Understanding these alternative disruption techniques and how they affect network anonymity, privacy, and performance is paramount not only to the successful design of future technologies, but also to the security of existing networks and systems.

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Visible to the public CAREER: The Theoretical Foundations of Symmetric Cryptography

Submitted by Stefano Tessaro on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 3:01pm

Cryptography is essential to ensure confidentiality and integrity of information. Due to their practicality, symmetric algorithms where the same secret key is used by the sender and the recipient underlie most practical deployments of cryptographic techniques. However, also as a result of this, symmetric cryptography suffers from an inherent tension between real world efficiency demands and provable security guarantees. This project investigates new technical advances aimed at narrowing the gap between provable security and the practical demands of symmetric cryptography.

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Visible to the public CAREER: Secure OS Views for Modern Computing Platforms

Submitted by enck on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 2:58pm

The security architecture of consumer operating systems is currently undergoing a fundamental change. In platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows 8, each application is a separate security principal that can own data. While this distinction is a vast improvement over traditional user-focused security architectures, sharing data between applications results in an unexpected loss of control of that data, potentially exposing security and privacy sensitive information.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public CAREER: Re-thinking Electronic Design Automation Algorithms for Secure Outsourced Integrated Circuit Fabrication

Submitted by Siddharth Garg on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 2:56pm

Semiconductor chip fabrication is being increasingly outsourced to off-shore foundries. Outsourced fabrication reduces cost by leveraging economies-of-scale and ensures access to the most advanced manufacturing technology, but comes at the expense of trust. How can the chip designer trust that the off-shore (untrusted) foundry does not pirate its intellectual property (IP), or maliciously modify the integrated circuit (IC) by inserting a hardware Trojan in the chip? This project develops transformative new solutions for trustworthy chip fabrication at off-shore foundries.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Towards Agile and Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing

Submitted by Meng Yu on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 2:49pm

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.

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Visible to the public CRII: SaTC: Camera-based mobile device end-user authentication

Submitted by Matthias Kirchner on Fri, 10/06/2017 - 2:42pm

Secure and useable end-user authentication is a major challenge in a modern society that allocates and relocates more and more resources online. As many users nowadays carry a mobile device (e.g., a smartphone), authentication approaches beyond the often-criticized traditional password leverage auxiliary information that can be received by, displayed on, computed by or sent from these omnipresent personal companions.