Deter

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Exposing Attack Vectors and Identifying Defense Solutions for Data Cellular Networks

Submitted by Zhuoqing Mao on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 10:45am

This project addresses several key emerging security challenges that arise due to the wildly successful large-scale adoption of mobile devices with diverse network capabilities. The novel approach focuses on to understanding how various information that are legitimately and willingly provided by smartphone users due to the requested permissions of downloaded applications can be potentially abused. The second research focus is to identify improvements in the design of cellular network middlebox (e.g., firewall) policies by detailed exposure and explicitly defining the key requirements.

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Visible to the public  TWC: Small: Collaborative: Multipath TCP Side Channel Vulnerabilities and Defenses

Submitted by Zhiyun Qian on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:34am

The objective of this project is to understand and strengthen the security of Multipath TCP (MPTCP) - an IETF standardized suite of TCP extensions that allow one MPTCP connection, consisting of multiple sub-connections between two hosts, to use multiple paths simultaneously. Even though MPTCP has been gaining momentum in being widely deployed, its security is yet to be well understood. The project is expected to raise awareness of MPTCP security and ultimately yield a foundation for MPTCP security.

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Visible to the public  TWC: Small: Cache-based Side Channel Attacks on Smartphone Graphics Buffers: New Vulnerabilities and Defenses

Submitted by Zhiyun Qian on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:22am

Touch screens on smart mobile devices such as cell phones or tablets allow both user input (touch events) and display output. For a touch screen to function, the mobile device stores input and display data in a graphics buffer internal to the device. The researchers have discovered that a malicious application running on the mobile device could silently monitor characteristics of the graphics buffer to identify the alphanumeric characters that the user types into the touch keyboard or information displayed on the screen.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Better Security for Efficient Secret-Key Cryptography

Submitted by Stefano Tessaro on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:18am

Present-day cryptography crucially relies on secret-key cryptography, the setting where communicating parties use a shared secret key, hidden to the attacker, to securely encrypt and/or authenticate data. Secret-key cryptography is based on standardized efficient algorithms known as cryptographic primitives, such as block ciphers and hash functions. These act as building blocks for so-called modes of operations, cryptographic algorithms achieving strong security goals for encryption and authentication, and which are orders of magnitude faster than public-key ones.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Automorphic Forms and Harmonic Analysis Methods in Lattice Cryptology

Submitted by Stephen Miller on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:12am

Cryptography is a fundamental part of cybersecurity, both in designing secure applications as well as understanding how truly secure they really are. Traditionally, the mathematical underpinnings of cryptosystems were based on difficult problems involving whole numbers (most famously, the apparent difficulty of factoring a product of two unknown primes back into those prime factors). More recently, several completely new types of cryptography have been proposed using the mathematical properties of lattices.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Hardware Trojans in Wireless Networks - Risks and Remedies

Submitted by Yiorgos Makris on Wed, 10/25/2017 - 8:06am

This project investigates the risks instigated by malicious hardware modifications (hardware Trojans) in the nodes of a wireless network and aims to develop remedies, thereby enabling secure deployment and fostering technology trustworthiness. Due to the lack of assurance mechanisms in the globalized integrated circuit (IC) supply chain, hardware Trojans have recently become the topic of intensified concern.

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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: 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 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.