Research Infrastructure

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: The Theory and Practice of Key Derivation

Submitted by Yevgeniy Dodis on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:00am

Most cryptographic applications crucially rely on secret keys that are chosen randomly and are unknown to an attacker. Unfortunately, the process of deriving secret keys in practice is often difficult, error-prone and riddled with security vulnerabilities. Badly generated keys offer a prevalent source of attacks that render complex cryptographic applications completely insecure, despite their sophisticated design and rigorous mathematical analysis.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Systems, Tools, and Techniques for Executing, Managing, and Securing SGX Programs

Submitted by Taesoo Kim on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 7:55am

The Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a new technology introduced to make secure and trustworthy computing in a hostile environment practical. However, SGX is merely just a set of instructions. Its software support that includes the OS support, toolchain and libraries, is currently developed in a closed manner, limiting its impact only within the boundary of big companies such as Intel and Microsoft. Meanwhile, SGX does not automatically secure everything and it still faces various attacks such as controlled-side channel and enclave memory corruption.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Retrofitting Software for Defense-in-Depth

Submitted by Trent Jaeger on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 7:05am

The computer security community has long advocated the concept of building multiple layers of defense to protect a system. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to realize this vision in the practice of software development, and software often ships with inadequate defenses, typically developed in an ad hoc fashion.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: HIMALAYAS: Hierarchical Machine Learning Stack for Fine-Grained Analysis of Malware Domain Groups

Submitted by Vinod Yegneswaran on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 6:58am

The domain name system (DNS) protocol plays a significant role in operation of the Internet by enabling the bi-directional association of domain names with IP addresses. It is also increasingly abused by malware, particularly botnets, by use of: (1) automated domain generation algorithms for rendezvous with a command-and-control (C&C) server, (2) DNS fast flux as a way to hide the location of malicious servers, and (3) DNS as a carrier channel for C&C communications.

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Visible to the public TWC: Large: Collaborative: Living in the Internet of Things

Submitted by Tadayoshi Kohno on Tue, 10/24/2017 - 12:51pm

More and more objects used in daily life have Internet connectivity, creating an "Internet of Things" (IoT). Computer security and privacy for an IoT ecosystem are fundamentally important because security breaches can cause real and significant harm to people, their homes, and their community.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Automated Security Testing for Applications Integrating Third-Party Services

Submitted by David Evans on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 11:44pm

Modern web and mobile applications increasingly rely on code and services from multiple parties, including services that provide security-critical functions like authentication, payments, and sharing. Developers often make mistakes in integrating these services into their applications that lead to serious security vulnerabilities. These integration failures are mainly due to failures to understand and ensure assumptions necessary for secure use of the external service.

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Visible to the public SaTC: An Architecture for Restoring Trust in Our Personal Computing Systems

Submitted by David August on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 11:03pm

Computers today are so complex and opaque that a user cannot possibly hope to know, let alone trust, everything occurring within the machine. While software security techniques help ensure the integrity of user computations, they are only as trustworthy as the underlying hardware. Even though many proposals provide some relief to the problem of hardware trust, the user must ultimately rely on the assurances of other parties. This work restores hardware trust through a simple, small, and slow pluggable hardware element.

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Visible to the public CAREER: Bridging the Semantic Gap in Virtualization-based Security Solutions via Collaboration between Guest OS and Virtual Machine

Submitted by Daniela Oliveira on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 10:52pm

In the last ten years virtual machines (VMs) have been extensively used for security-related applications, such as intrusion detection systems, malicious software (malware) analyzers and secure logging and replay of system execution. A VM is high-level software designed to emulate a computer's hardware. In the traditional usage model, security solutions are placed in a VM layer, which has complete control of the system resources. The guest operating system (OS) is considered to be easily compromised by malware and runs unaware of virtualization.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public EAGER: Transparency Bridges: Exploring Transparency Requirements in Smartphone Ecosystems

Submitted by Danny Weitzner on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 10:36pm

Transparency Bridges undertakes a cross-cultural investigation of the differences in privacy attitudes between the US and the EU, as a means of exploring the design requirements for user control mechanisms. We (1) investigate the currently available mechanisms in smartphone ecosystems to inform people of collection and use of their personal data, (2) examine how these mechanisms comply with US and EU data privacy legal frameworks, and (3) analyze how different mechanisms respond to requirements in both jurisdictions.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Analysis and Tools for Auditing Insider Accesses

Submitted by Daniel Fabbri on Mon, 10/23/2017 - 7:00pm

Compliance officers specify organizations' policies and procedures for mitigating risk to sensitive data. However, demands for employees' quick access to organizational data often limit which security technologies can be deployed. As a result, many organizations configure an open access environment in which authenticated employees can access any piece of data (e.g., a common practice across health care facilities).