Protect

Advances in privacy-enhancing technologies, including cryptographic mechanisms, standardized security protocols, and infrastructure, significantly improved privacy and had a significant impact on society by protecting users. At the same time, the success of such infrastructure has attracted abuse from illegal activities, including sophisticated botnets and ransomware, and has become a marketplace for drugs and contraband; botnets rose to be a major tool for cybercrime and their developers proved to be highly resourceful.

This project aims at advancing the state-of-the-art in cybersecurity by developing efficient methods for generating novel biometric signatures and performing active and continuous user authentication. Current authentication procedures typically occur once at the initial log-in stage and involve user proxies such as passwords and smart cards which suffer from several vulnerabilities.

Recent advances of isolated execution technologies, especially the emergence of Intel Software Guard eXtension (SGX), revolutionize the model of computer security and empower programs with sensitive data and code to be shielded from untrusted operating systems. However, their security guarantees have not yet been thoroughly investigated against the notorious vector of information leakage side-channel attacks. It is conceivable that side-channel attacks with full control of the underlying operating system are more diverse, efficient and robust than those from unprivileged programs.

The Internet has become one of the most effective and common means of conveying expression that is likely to be controversial or suppressed. This freedom of expression is threatened by the now widespread practice of Internet censorship by both private and state interests.

Many challenging real world problems, e.g., voting and blind auction, require computation over sensitive data supplied by multiple mutually-distrustful entities. Elegant cryptographic theories have been developed to solve these problems without relying on a mutually-trusted third party. Practitioners also built prototypes capable of securely computing set intersection, AES encryption, Hamming distance, etc. However, many other applications, such as data mining and running universal machines, are far more complex than what can be supported by the state-of-the-art techniques.