TWC

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Understanding and Defending Against Crowdsourced Online Identities

Remarkable things can be achieved by harnessing power of the masses. By breaking down tasks and distributing to users, "crowdsourcing" systems can accomplish complex tasks such as translating books or creating 3D photo tours. Unfortunately, the opposite also holds: misuse of these systems creates powerful tools that can compromise the security of online communities, since today's security mechanisms focus on defending against automated scripts and fake accounts, but not real users.

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Visible to the public TWC TTP: Small: Security, Privacy, and Trust for Systems of Coordinating Medical Devices

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.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Friendsourcing to Detect Network Manipulation

Traditionally, security on the Internet has been concerned with threats posed by edge nodes (hosts) to other hosts and to the middle nodes of the network (routers). However, in recent years,a rising number of instances in which hosts seek to defend themselves against the middle of the network can be seen. Examples include censorship and network neutrality violations, which fall into a general category of ?network manipulation?.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Detection and Prevention of Prior Known Software Security Vulnerabilities

Software is a critical element in a wide range of real-world applications. Attacks against computer software can cause substantial damage to the cyber-infrastructure of our modern society and economy. In fact, many new software security vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis. Therefore, it is vital to identify and resolve those security issues as early as possible. This research aims to investigate a scientific foundation and a novel methodology for automated detection, prevention, and resolution of prior-known software security vulnerabilities in software systems.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Assessing Online Information Exposure Using Web Footprints

This research project studies a new area of research - exposure detection - that is at the intersection of data mining, security, and natural language processing. Exposure detection refers to discovering components/attributes of a user's public profile that reduce the user's privacy. To help the public understand the privacy risks of sharing certain information on the web, this research project focuses on developing efficient algorithms for modeling how an adversary learns information using incomplete and schemaless public data sources.

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Visible to the public TWC: Phase: Small: Censorship Counterstrike via Measurement, Filtering, Evasion, and Protocol Enhancement

This project studies Internet censorship as practiced by some of today's nation-states. The effort emphasizes analyzing the techncial measures used by censors to perform censorship, the extent to which their operations inflict collateral damage (unintended blocking, or blocking of activity wholly outside the censoring nation), and vulnerabilities due to the specifics of how censorship operates.

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Visible to the public TWC: Phase: Small: Software Cruising for System Security

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.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Protecting Privacy of Biometric Data throughout Computation

Progress in computer vision makes biometric authentication and recognition become more reliable and readily available than before, with a potential for ubiquitous use of such data well beyond traditional authentication. The need to protect highly sensitive biometrics is apparent, which, unlike other types of data used for authentication purposes, cannot be revoked and replaced with a new value. This means that any breach in security of biometric data has far reaching consequences to the individual than loss of other sensitive data.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Exploring Cryptographic Models and Setup Assumptions

One of the cornerstones of modern cryptography is that new constructions of cryptographic protocols should be accompanied by a proof of security. Such proofs show that a construction satisfies a given definition of security, under certain assumptions and in a specific model.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Caging Libraries To Control Software Faults

The vast majority of the code in most applications comes from the libraries it imports, rather than the program itself. As a result, hackers often exploit flaws in libraries like glibc or openssl that are used across multiple applications instead of attacking individual flaws in code specific to the application. This makes it easier for an attacker to compromise many applications at once with a single exploit. This work isolates the impact of flaws in a deployed program into the smallest area possible.