Protect

This project focuses on shoring up the security vulnerabilities that exist in computer processors. Just like in software, bugs in hardware present vulnerabilities that can be exploited by determined attackers. Prior work has developed a method whereby the processor monitors itself and sends an alert to software whenever dangerous, anomalous behavior is observed. The question of what constitutes dangerous behavior is an open one, and tackling it is the goal of this research.

Organizations need to protect their computer systems from attackers. They often group their own computers into risk pools to reduce threat propagation and monitor the communication between these groups. Unfortunately, this boundary monitoring is unable to see traffic within groups and, since each monitor is segmented, they cannot form a holistic picture of the entire network. Finally, modern approaches must examine network traffic in isolation, without the ability to know what action on the originating computer caused it.

This project tackles the social and economic elements of Internet security: how the motivations and interactions of attackers, defenders, and users shape the threats we face, how they evolve over time, and how they can best be addressed. While security is a phenomenon mediated by the technical workings of computers and networks, it is ultimately a conflict driven by economic and social issues that merit a commensurate level of scrutiny.

The Wireless Philadelphia Network (WPN) is a metropolitan?area network (MAN) consisting of thousands of Tropos 5210 wireless mesh routers distributed across the entire city of Philadelphia and connected by a fiber backbone. This project is employing this network as a testbed to investigate three diverse security challenges facing any large-scale wireless network servicing a heterogeneous population.

Fuzzy extractors convert biometric data into reproducible uniform random strings, and make it possible to apply cryptographic techniques for biometric security. They are used to encrypt and authenticate user data with keys derived from biometric inputs. This research investigates how hardware security primitives can have provable cryptographic properties, a connection which is largely lacking in currently available hardware primitives.