Assure Information Flows

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Intelligent Malware Detection Utilizing Novel File Relation-Based Features and Resilient Techniques for Adversarial Attacks

Submitted by Yanfang Ye on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 2:27pm

Malware (e.g., viruses, worms, and Trojans) is software that deliberately fulfills the harmful intent of an attacker. It has been used as a major weapon by the cyber-criminals to launch a wide range of attacks that cause serious damages and significant financial losses to many Internet users. To protect legitimate users from these attacks, the most significant line of defense against malware is anti-malware software products, which predominately use signature-based methods to recognize threats.

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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: Small: Techniques and Tools for General-Purpose Secure Computing and Outsourcing

Submitted by Marina Blanton on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 1:12pm

The rapid advancement of techniques for secure computation on protected data offers a major incentive for development of tools for general-purpose secure computation that protects data privacy, as opposed to computation of specialized tasks. The recent emergence of cloud computing and the need to protect privacy of sensitive data used in outsourced computation serves as another major motivation for this work. With this in mind, this project targets at developing a compiler suitable for privacy-preserving execution of any functionality specified by a user program.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Computing on Cryptographic Data

Submitted by Dan Boneh on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 12:37pm

This project is developing new techniques for manipulating sensitive data by exploring two related areas, computing on private keys and computing on authenticated data. Currently, a private key is an inert object that gives its holder the ability to perform a cryptographic operation on all messages, as may be the case when generating a signature. The project is exploring a new vision, in which computing on the private key itself creates new restricted private keys that can only perform restricted operations such as, for example, signing only some messages but not others.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public TWC: Large: Collaborative: Computing Over Distributed Sensitive Data

Submitted by Stephen Chong on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 12:30pm

Information about individuals is collected by a variety of organizations including government agencies, banks, hospitals, research institutions, and private companies. In many cases, sharing this data among organizations can bring benefits in social, scientific, business, and security domains, as the collected information is of similar nature, of about similar populations. However, much of this collected data is sensitive as it contains personal information, or information that could damage an organization's reputation or competitiveness.

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Visible to the public TTP: Small: A Kit for Exploring Databases under the Hood for Security, Forensics and Data Recovery

Submitted by Alexander Rasin on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 12:15pm

Database Management Systems (DBMS) have been used to store and process data in organizations for decades. Larger organizations use a variety of databases (commercial, open-source or custom-built) for different departments. However, neither users nor Database Administrators (DBAs) know exactly where the data is stored on the system or how it is processed. Most relational databases store internal data using universal principles that can be inferred and captured.

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Visible to the public TC: Small: Least Privilege Enforcement through Secure Memory Views

Submitted by aniketpkate on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 11:55am

The goal of this project is to provide protection against exploits through untrusted third-party software components and against malicious application manipulation. These problems constitute an important class of vulnerabilities in current software, and are tied to a common denominator -- the lack of ability to divide a program and the data manipulated by it in a fine-grained manner and to control the interactions between the resulting constituents.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public TC: Medium: Security and Privacy Preserving Data Mining and Management for Disctributed Domains

Submitted by ghafoor on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 11:38am

A fundamental but challenging issue in information security is secure sharing and management of sensitive data and information among numerous organizations that form large-scale e-enterprises. Today, an increasing number of enterprises are using the Internet for managing and sharing users? and enterprise information through online databases. However, security and privacy of data is an overriding concern currently limiting the proliferation of information technology.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public SaTC: Small: New Challenges in Functional Encryption

Submitted by Tal Malkin on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 10:40am

Recent trends in computing have prompted users and organizations to store an increasingly large amount of sensitive data at third party locations in the cloud outside of their direct control. In order to protect this data, it needs to be encrypted. However, traditional encryption systems lack the expressiveness needed for most applications involving big and complex data.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public NeTS: Medium: HayStack: Fine-grained Visibility and Control of Mobile Traffic for Enhanced Performance, Privacy and Security

Submitted by Narseo Vallina-Ro... on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 9:54am

Despite our growing reliance on mobile phones for a wide range of daily tasks, their operation remains largely opaque even for experts. Mobile users have little insight into how their mobile apps operate and perform in the network, into how (or whether) they protect the information that users entrust to them, and with whom they share user's personal information. A number of previous studies have addressed elements of this problem in a partial fashion, trading off analytic comprehensiveness and deployment scale.