CORE

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Visible to the public NSF-BSF: SaTC: CORE: Small: Blockchain Fairness

Submitted by Ari Juels on Thu, 08/08/2019 - 10:28am

Blockchains provide compelling security properties that enable powerful systems to be constructed without reliance on trusted third parties. Their rise has created successful, multi-billion dollar systems and has had a transformative impact on venture funding and the financial industry. Blockchains as currently designed, though, fail to enforce fairness for their users, meaning equal opportunities for fast transaction processing. The project investigators will seek to address the pervasive fairness deficiencies in blockchain systems.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Protecting Confidentiality and Integrity of Deep Neural Networks against Side-Channel and Fault Attacks

Submitted by Yunsi Fei on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 6:56pm

Deep learning (DL) has become a foundational means for solving diverse problems ranging from computer vision, natural language processing, digital surveillance to finance and healthcare. Security of the deep neural network (DNN) inference engines and trained DNN models on various platforms have become one of the biggest challenges in deploying artificial intelligence. Confidentiality breaches of the DNN model can facilitate manipulations of the DNN inference, resulting in potentially devastating consequences.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: A Secure Processor that Exploits Multicore Parallelism while Protecting Against Microarchitecture State Attacks

Submitted by Omer Khan on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 6:52pm

Microprocessors are widely deployed in cloud, fog, edge, and mobile computing platforms. In all cases, the economies of scale stem from our ability (through the use of mature virtualization technologies) to host large sets of applications from diverse domains. These applications increasingly operate on private or confidential user data. A major hurdle for exposing and exploiting virtualization capabilities in next generation processors is the lack of a clear vision for how to address the security challenges associated with co-locating applications that share hardware.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Memory-hard Cryptography

Submitted by Stefano Tessaro on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 6:45pm

Cryptography provides the basic tools to guarantee confidentiality and integrity of data. It hence plays a pivotal role in securing our digital infrastructure, and in enforcing the right for privacy of individuals. The development of secure cryptographic techniques is however difficult and error-prone, as unknown attack strategies need to be taken into account. To overcome this, modern cryptography advocates the paradigm of provable security, where threat models are precisely formalized using the language of mathematics, and the security of cryptosystems is proved within these models.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Cryptographic Data Protection in Modern Systems

Submitted by David Cash on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 6:39pm

Continuing major breaches and security compromises of computer systems motivate a promising new approach to data protection: encrypt the data so that even if stolen, it will be useless to the attacker, yet reveal just enough information about the data so that commodity systems such as databases and Web servers can still operate on it. This is called property-revealing encryption (PRE), and has already found its way to academic and commercial products that protect sensitive data in cloud services.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Presentation-attack-robust biometrics systems via computational imaging of physiology and materials

Submitted by Vishal Patel on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 4:52pm

Many physical characteristics, such as face, fingerprints, and iris as well as behavioral characteristics such as voice, gait, and keystroke dynamics, are believed to be unique to an individual. Hence, biometric analysis offers a reliable solution to the problem of identity verification. It is now widely acknowledged that biometric systems are vulnerable to manipulation where the true biometric is falsified using various attack strategies; such attacks are referred to as Presentation Attacks (PAs).

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Implicit One-handed Mobile User Authentication by Induced Thumb Biometrics on Touch-screen Handheld Devices

Submitted by Lina Zhou on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 4:25pm

People often store private and sensitive data on their mobile devices, and the security of these devices is essential. This project advances and develops a new process for verifying a user's legitimate right to access a mobile device. Existing research has not made this process very usable for many people who lack dexterity or the use of both hands. This research aims to design and develop a method for one-handed authentication on a touch-screen mobile handheld device. The objective is to improve both security and usability of authentication.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Expanding the Frontiers of Lattice-Based Cryptography

Submitted by David Wu on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 4:22pm

Research and development into quantum computers raises many new challenges for security and privacy. For instance, large-scale quantum computers would compromise much of the cryptography used to secure the Internet today. This project's novelty is in developing new and systematic approaches for constructing advanced cryptographic primitives that remain robust even in the presence of sophisticated quantum adversaries.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Small: Transforming Non-Malleable Cryptography

Submitted by Vipu Goyal on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 4:20pm

This project aims to enhance our understanding of tampering attacks which are one of the most basic ones in cryptography and computer security. A tampering adversary may try to modify data at rest or in transit, which could be devastating to the security of a number of computer systems. The goal of non-malleable cryptography is to develop the tools and techniques required to secure computer systems against such attacks. The project's novelties are in conceptualizing a number of new primitives which can help fight against such attacks in emerging computer systems.

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Visible to the public SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Toward Enforceable Data Usage Control in Cloud-based IoT Systems

Submitted by Ning Zhang on Wed, 08/07/2019 - 4:16pm

In the upcoming evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is anticipated that billions of devices will be connected to the Internet. While IoT promises a more connected and smarter world, this pervasive large-scale data collection, storage, sharing, and analysis raise many privacy concerns. In the current IoT ecosystem, IoT service providers have full control of the collected user data. They use the data for smart IoT system and device control. They could also use the data for other purposes not consented to by the users.