Scientific Foundations

The goal of our work is to (a) capture people's expectations and surprises in using mobile apps in a scalable manner, and to (b) summarize these perceptions in a simple format to help people make better trust decisions. Our main idea is analyzing privacy in the form of people's expectations about what an app will and won't do, focusing on where an app breaks people's expectations. We are building an App Scanner that combines automated scanning techniques with crowdsourcing.

The security of our software is critical for consumer confidence, the protection of privacy and valuable intellectual property, and of course national security. Because of our society's increased reliance on software, security breaches can lead to serious personal or corporate losses, and endanger the privacy, liberties, and even the lives of individuals. As threats to software security have become more sophisticated, so too have the techniques and analyses developed to improve it. Symbolic execution has emerged as a fundamental tool for security applications.

To lower costs and improve outcomes in current medical practice we need integrated interoperable medical systems to provide machine-assisted care, interaction detection, and improved alarm accuracy, to name just a few uses. This project is developing both the theory and practice to ensure the safety of next-generation medical devices by allowing secure coordination and composition, in facilities as small as a local doctor's office or as large as a multi-campus hospital.

Software bugs and vulnerabilities are primary causes for cyber-security breaches in today's society. Runtime monitoring, a technique to enforce safety and security properties at program execution time, is essential to detect intrusions and keep the system healthy. One of the main obstacles to adopt runtime monitoring techniques in practice is high performance overhead. Inlined security monitoring enforcement often delays and blocks the execution of protected programs.

Silicon physically unclonable function (PUF) is a supplemental circuit embedded in an IC which generates signatures unique to its native IC. This signature could be used for authentication, protection of data and secure communication. PUFs rely on the presence of uncontrollable variations in the fabrication process causing the circuit parameters to exhibit randomness. Current approaches for PUF design have mostly investigated circuit and architectural aspects. PUF quality is severely marred by a lack of understanding of exactly how fabrication process variations impact the PUF responses.