Transition to Practice

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol constitutes the key building block for today's Internet security and is, for example, used for encrypted web connections using the HTTPS protocol. However, from its first version in 1994 until today, researchers and practitioners keep discovering TLS deficiencies undermining the protocol's security on a regular basis. While the academic community has applied intense scrutiny to the TLS/X.509 ecosystem, much of such work depends on access to difficult to acquire representative data on the protocol's deployment and usage.

As passive tagging technologies like RFID become more economical and ubiquitous, it can be envisioned that in the future, millions of sensors integrated with these tags could become an integral part of the next generation of smart infrastructure and the overall concept of internet-of-things. As a result, securing these passive assets against data theft and counterfeiting would become a priority, reinforcing the importance of the proposed dynamic authentication techniques.

The proposed project will develop Visualization and Analysis of C Code Security (VACCS) tool to assist students with learning secure code programming. The proposal addresses the critical issue of learning secure coding through the development of a system for analyzing and visualizing C code and associated learning materials. VACCS will utilize static and dynamic program analysis to detect security vulnerabilities and warn programmers about the potential errors in their code.

Outsourcing storage to the cloud has become more widespread in recent years; however, cloud storage services are constantly exposed to a number of non-trivial adversarial threats. This work addresses security risks arising from the leakage of access patterns, which is the ability of an adversary to detect when the same item is accessed repeatedly on a storage server, which has been shown to substantially impact data privacy.

Modifications to integrated circuits (ICs) or the insertion of foreign intellectual property pose a serious threat to U.S. sovereignty, as ICs are found in many consumer electronic devices, including phones, computers, and televisions. More importantly, many commercial and military U.S. assets rely on ICs for computation and management of critical infrastructure such as banking, energy, and defense systems. The primary impact of the proposed work is to improve the security of U.S.