TWC

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.

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.

A wide range of cloud services and applications operate on sensitive data such as business, personal, and governmental information. This renders security and privacy as the most critical concerns in the cloud era. The objective of this project is to question the separation approach in the design of security and reliability features of storage systems, and to investigate new, coding-based security mechanisms based on a joint-design principle. The proposed program will result in a myriad of outcomes.

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.

This research focuses on understanding the digital security and privacy needs of journalists and their sources to evaluate and design communication technologies that better support the fundamental operations of a globally free and unfettered press. Journalists -- along with their organizations and sources -- are known to be high-risk targets for cyberattack. This community can serve as a privacy and security bellwether, motivated to use new technologies, but requiring flexibility and ease-of-use. Many existing secure tools are too cumbersome for journalists to use on a regular basis.