Research Infrastructure

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service: Analyses and Defenses

Submitted by Haining Wang on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 1:33pm

Living in an age when services are often rated, people are increasingly depending on reputation of sellers or products/apps when making purchases online. This puts pressure on people to gain and maintain a high reputation by offering reliable and high-quality services and/or products, which benefits the society at large. Unfortunately, due to extremely high competition in e-commerce or app stores, recently reputation manipulation related services have quickly developed into a sizable business, which is termed Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service (REaaS).

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Practical Hardware-Assisted Always-On Malware Detection

Submitted by Dmitry Ponomarev on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 1:31pm

The project explores building support for malware detection in hardware. Malware detection is challenging and resource intensive, as the number and sophistication of malware increases. The resource requirements for malware detection limit its use in practice, leaving malware unchecked on many systems. We use a low level hardware detector to identify malware as a computational anomaly using low level features such as hardware events, instruction mixes and memory address patterns.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: An Iterative Approach to Secure Computation

Submitted by Abhi Shelat on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 1:24pm

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows several mutually untrusting parties to perform joint computations while keeping their inputs private. This project develops new techniques for constructing two-party secure computation protocols with low communication overhead. Building on the Principal Investigator's prior work for constructing special-purpose secure MPC protocols for greedy algorithms, this project develops new techniques that exploit the algorithmic structure of a function in order to develop more efficient secure computation protocols.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Measuring and Improving the Management of Today's PKI

Submitted by dml on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 12:43pm

The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), along with the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, are responsible for securing Internet transactions such as banking, email, and e-commerce; they provide users with the ability to verify with whom they are communicating online, and enable encryption of those communications. While the use of the PKI is mostly automated, there is a surprising amount of human intervention in management tasks that are crucial to its proper operation.

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Visible to the public SaTC: Collaborative: Exploiting Spintronics for Security, Trust and Authentication

Submitted by Rashmi Jha on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 10:35am

The Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) based security primitives typically suffer from area/power overhead, sensitivity to environmental fluctuations and limited randomness and entropy offered by Silicon substrate. Spintronic circuits can complement the existing CMOS based security and trust infrastructures. This project explores ways to uncover the security specific properties of the magnetic nanowire and capture them in detailed circuit model.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public SaTC: Collaborative: Exploiting Spintronics for Security, Trust and Authentication

Submitted by Rashmi Jha on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 10:33am

The Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) based security primitives typically suffer from area/power overhead, sensitivity to environmental fluctuations and limited randomness and entropy offered by Silicon substrate. Spintronic circuits can complement the existing CMOS based security and trust infrastructures. This project explores ways to uncover the security specific properties of the magnetic nanowire and capture them in detailed circuit model.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Towards a Traffic Analysis Resistant Internet Architecture

Submitted by Kuang-Ching Wang on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 9:29am

Many nation states restrict citizen access to information over the Internet by analyzing Internet users' traffic and then blocking traffic deemed controversial or antithetical to the views of the nation state. This project explores an alternative end-to-end network architecture that removes the vulnerability of citizens to traffic analysis. The researchers propose alternative Internet architecture and protocol designs, assesses the impact of such designs on Internet stakeholders, and provide assessment methods for correctness, performance, and scalability of the alternative design.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Real-time Enforcement of Content Security Policy upon Real-world Websites

Submitted by Yinzhi Cao on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 9:26am

Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities -- though being known for more than ten years -- are still one of the most commonly-found web application vulnerabilities in the wild. Among all the defenses proposed by researchers, one widely-adopted approach is called Content Security Policy (CSP) -- which has been standardized by W3C and adopted by all major commercial browsers, such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Toward a Test Bed for Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security Experimentation

Submitted by Indrakshi on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 9:10am

Heavy vehicles, such as trucks and buses, are part of the US critical infrastructure and carry out a significant portion of commercial and private business operations. Little effort has been invested in cyber security for these assets. If an adversary gains access to the vehicle's Controller Area Network (CAN), attacks can be launched that can affect critical vehicle electronic components. Traditionally, physical access to a heavy vehicle was required to access the CAN.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Toward a Test Bed for Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security Experimentation

Submitted by Rosanne Gamble on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 9:08am

Heavy vehicles, such as trucks and buses, are part of the US critical infrastructure and carry out a significant portion of commercial and private business operations. Little effort has been invested in cyber security for these assets. If an adversary gains access to the vehicle's Controller Area Network (CAN), attacks can be launched that can affect critical vehicle electronic components. Traditionally, physical access to a heavy vehicle was required to access the CAN.