TWC

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Visible to the public TWC SBES: Medium: Collaborative: Evolutionary Approaches to Privacy and Information Security

Submitted by Acquisti Alessandro on Sun, 03/04/2018 - 7:57pm

The project explores the influence that offline cues and stimuli, indicating the presence of other human beings in the physical world, and often processed unconsciously by our brains, can have over security and privacy behavior in cyberspace.

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: Reputation as Public Policy for Internet Security

Submitted by Andrew Whinston on Sun, 03/04/2018 - 7:13pm

Internet miscreants cooperate for profit in identity theft, denial of service, etc. Meanwhile, defending organizations act separately and treat Internet information security (infosec) as a cost to be minimized. Customers could choose more wisely among competing Internet firms if they knew which had good or bad security, and such fame or shame would cause firms to improve security to retain and attract customers.

Outcomes Report URL: 
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_win...
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Visible to the public TWC: Student travel grants for Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security 2014

Submitted by Lorrie Cranor on Wed, 02/14/2018 - 7:23pm

The Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human computer interaction, security, and privacy. The program features technical papers, workshops and tutorials, a poster session, panels and invited talks, and discussion sessions. The tenth SOUPS will be held July 9-11, 2014 at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. The funds support travel grants for students to attend the conference. SOUPS is the top conference devoted to usable privacy and security.

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: Securing Cloud Infrastructure: Unobtrusive Techniques for Detecting Hypervisor Compromise

Submitted by Jordan Shropshire on Wed, 02/14/2018 - 7:16pm

Hypervisors are the building blocks of cloud computing. They host the virtualized operating systems and applications which provide highly-scalable, pervasive services on a continuous basis. These thin-layer, bare-metal operating systems create a prime target for attack. A compromised hypervisor grants access to hosted virtual machines and data stores. Its computing resources can be used for malicious purposes, including mounting additional attacks.

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: Towards Privacy Preserving Online Image Sharing

Submitted by Cornelia Caragea on Tue, 02/06/2018 - 4:37pm

On-line sharing of images has become a key enabler of users' connectivity. Various types of images are shared through social media to represent users' interests and experiences. While extremely convenient and socially valuable, this level of pervasiveness introduces acute privacy concerns. First, once shared images may go anywhere, as copying / resharing images is straightforward. Second, the information disclosed through an image reveals aspects of users' private lives, affecting both the owner and other subjects in the image.

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Visible to the public TWC: Large: Collaborative: Verifiable Hardware: Chips that Prove their Own Correctness

Submitted by Michael Taylor on Tue, 02/06/2018 - 4:22pm

This project addresses how semiconductor designers can verify the correctness of ICs that they source from possibly untrusted fabricators. Existing solutions to this problem are either based on legal and contractual obligations, or use post-fabrication IC testing, both of which are unsatisfactory or unsound. As a sound alternative, this project designs and fabricates verifiable hardware: ICs that provide proofs of their correctness for every input-output computation they perform in the field.

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: Medium: Collaborative: Brain Hacking: Assessing Psychological and Computational Vulnerabilities in Brain-based Biometrics

Submitted by xuwenyao on Mon, 02/05/2018 - 3:21pm

In September of 2015, it was reported that hackers had stolen the fingerprint records of 5.6 million U.S. federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This was a severe security breach, and it is an even bigger problem because those fingerprints are now permanently compromised and the users cannot generate new fingerprints. This breach demonstrates two challenging facts about the current cybersecurity landscape. First, biometric credentials are vulnerable to compromise. And, second, biometrics that cannot be replaced if stolen are even more vulnerable to theft.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Computational Blinking - Computer Architecture Techniques for Mitigating Side Channels

Submitted by Timothy Sherwood on Mon, 02/05/2018 - 3:15pm

Computer systems increasingly perform operations on critical and confidential data. Despite best efforts to protect this information, the side effects of computations using this data, e.g., the computation time, the power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, thermal emanations, and acoustics, can be used to decipher secret information even when it is encrypted.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Collaborative: Secure and Usable Mobile Authentication for People with Visual Impairment

Submitted by Rui Zhang on Fri, 02/02/2018 - 3:13pm

Mobile authentication is necessary for preventing unauthorized access to mobile devices with increasingly more private information. Despite significant progress in mobile authentication for sighted people, secure and usable mobile authentication for people with visual impairment remains largely under-explored. This project is to develop, prototype and evaluate novel secure and usable mobile authentication techniques for people with visual impairment. There are three research thrusts.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Know Thy Enemy: Data Mining Meets Networks for Understanding Web-Based Malware Dissemination

Submitted by Tina Eliassi-Rad on Thu, 02/01/2018 - 6:29pm

ow does web-based malware spread? We use the term web-based malware to describe malware that is distributed through websites, and malicious posts in social networks. We are in an arms race against web-based malware distributors; and as in any war, knowledge is power. The more we know about them, the better we can defend ourselves. Our goal is to understand the dissemination of web-based malware by creating "MalScope", a suite of methods and tools that uses cutting-edge approaches to build spatiotemporal models, generators and sampling techniques for malware dissemination.