ISG

It is critical to protect the Internet from attacks such as denial of service, and attacks on inter-domain routing. Although several defenses have been proposed, actual deployments have been limited. A primary reason for this lack of deployment is that most defenses have not been validated under realistic conditions, or at sufficiently large scales. Many attacks also have second-order effects that are not well understood. This is because it is difficult to incorporate all the protocols involved at any reasonable scale in analytical, simulation, or emulation models or testbeds.

Software is a common target of attacks on the current computing / communications infrastructure. Software continues to be vulnerable to attacks that exploit obscure or misunderstood language and program features. Detection of these software exploits (also called "malware") will therefore be needed for the forseeable future as one part of an effective defense. Virus checkers detect many known exploits, and are now widely used, but attackers have adapted by obfuscating and mutating their code to evade virus checkers.

The project aims at studying properties of hash and trapdoor functions that are motivated by practical applications and are implicitly held by the random oracles or easy to realize in the idealistic random oracle model. But, are not well-defined and/or not known to be realizable in the standard model. In particular, the research studies non-malleable hash functions and (possibly trapdoor) functions that hide partial information. The project investigates the new appropriate notions of security for these primitives and seeks constructions that probably meet the security definitions.

This research project advances the understanding of security and privacy in pervasive healthcare by testing technological methods of securing implantable medical devices and by evaluating human factors through patient studies. The most fundamental question is how to balance the opposing goals of safety and effectiveness with security and privacy of wireless, implantable medical devices.

Answers to database queries often form the basis for critical decision-making. To improve efficiency and reliability, answers to these queries can be provided by distributed servers close to the querying clients. However, because of the servers' ubiquity, the logistics associated with fully securing them may be prohibitive; moreover, when the servers are run by third parties, the clients may not trust them as much as they trust the original data owners. Thus, the authenticity of the answers provided by servers in response to clients' queries must be verifiable by the clients.