Alexandra Boldyreva, Georgia Institute of Technology

This talk is about using the provable security techniques and, in particular, having appropriate security models for the analyses and and design of secure and efficient encryption schemes for various goals and settings. Encryption is a tool for achieving information privacy. It is usually analyzed in the single-user setting, where only a single recipient of encrypted data is considered. In the real word, however, there are many users, ...read more

Neophytos Neophytou, SUNY Stony Brook

The emerging world of large, loosely coupled information systems requires major changes to the way we approach security research. For many years, we have proposed construct after construct to enhance the power and scope of policy languages. Unfortunately, this focus has led to models whose complexity is unmanageable, to reinventing technologies that other subdisciplines have done better, and to assumptions that large enterprises simply do not satisfy. ...read more

Arnon Rosenthal, The Mitre Corporation

The emerging world of large, loosely coupled information systems requires major changes to the way we approach security research. For many years, we have proposed construct after construct to enhance the power and scope of policy languages. Unfortunately, this focus has led to models whose complexity is unmanageable, to reinventing technologies that other subdisciplines have done better, and to assumptions that large enterprises simply do not satisfy. ...read more

Adrian Spalka, University of Bonn, Germany

Sensitive communication between nodes on a network is well protected with various cryptographic techniques. However, communication between software components within a PC is usually not protected. And, even if cryptography is used, an attacker can analyse and extract secret keys stored in a component. This gives malicious software ample opportunity to communicate with these components and perform harmful operations. This work presents a PKI-v ...read more

Click here for information

Sam Owre, SRI International 

Strand spaces provide a method for analyzing cryptographic protocols. Originally designed for manual analysis by experts, strand spaces have since been automated. In this talk, I will discuss our work in automating strand spaces using the powerful PVS specification and verification system. I wil give an intro to strand spaces, discuss of the PVS formalization, and conclude with lessons learned and future work.

Sponsored by the ...read more

Jean-Camille Birget, Rutgers University

Passwords are the most commonly used form of user authentication. They are also one of the weakest links of computer security systems. Graphical passwords are based on visual information and try to exploit the innate human ability to process images. An example of a system that we developed uses an image on the screen and lets the user choose a few click points; these click points are the "password", and the user has to click closely to ...read more

Adam Finkelstein, Princeton University 

Today's desktop graphics technology can soundly outperform the million dollar 3D graphics workstation of a decade ago. However, this revolution in 3D performance has had only a modest impact on people's lives. One reason is that the average person does not create 3D content -- it's too difficult with existing tools. This might explain why the most noticeable impact of 3D graphics is entertainment: the game and movie industries ...read more

Policy-based confinement has been one of the most common approaches for enhancing software security, having found its use in SELinux, specification-based intrusion detection systems, sandboxing tools, and so on. However, conventional access control policies aren't powerful enough to stop a variety of attacks that involve subversion of legitimate access privileges granted to a program. For instance, consider an e-commerce application that stores its data in a database. If this application has ...read more

Suppose that we have a valuable on-line resource (for example, an on-line library), and a whole bunch of people authorized to access various sections of this resource (for example, some people have subscribed to the fiction section of the library, while others have subscribed to the biography section.) How does the resource verify that a given user is authorized to access the requested section?

One approach to resolving this issue is to first find out who the user is, and then check ...read more

Over the past seven years my work has slowly migrated "up" in levels of abstraction: from building simulation models of MEMS-based storage, to real-time emulation of online storage devices, to squeezing more efficiency out of the OS-storage interface, to adding intrusion monitoring functionality to computationally-enhanced storage. My current work, on providing "real security-related guarantees in virtualized execution environments," continues my upward migration.

...read more

The next NJPLS will be held at IBM as part of IBM PL Days. Driving directions, registration, and program information can be found at the IBM PL Days web site.

The MQV protocol of Law, Menezes, Qu, Solinas and Vanstone is possibly the most efficient of all known authenticated Diffie-Hellman protocols that use public-key authentication. In addition to great performance, the protocol has been designed to achieve a remarkable list of security properties. As a result MQV has been widely standardized, and has recently been chosen by the NSA as the key exchange mechanism underlying "the next generation cryptography to protect ... classified or mission ...read more

Jaideep Vaidya, Rutgers University

Privacy and security concerns can prevent sharing of data, derailing data mining projects. Distributed knowledge discovery, if done correctly, can alleviate this problem. The problem lies not so much with the results of data mining, but rather with the process of data mining. Current data mining algorithms require some form of access to all of the data, which in and of itself provides oppurtunity for misuse.

The key is to obtain valid results, w ...read more

Anindya Banerjee, Kansas State University

A modular, flow-sensitive information flow analysis for a simple imperative language is specified via a Hoare-like logic. The logic is based on an abstract interpretation of command denotations that makes independence between program variables explicit. Modularity of the analysis is demonstrated by showing that a frame rule holds in the logic.

We show how the logic can be applied to a program transformation, namely, forward slicing: given a ...read more

Practical specification languages for imperative and object-oriented programs, such as JML, Eiffel, and Spec#, allow the use of program expressions including method calls in specification formulas. For coherent semantics of specifications, and to avoid anomalies with runtime assertion checking, expressions in specifications and assertions are typically required to be strongly pure in the sense that their evaluation has no effect on the state of preexisting objects. For specification of large ...read more

For more information please contact:

Dr. David Naumann
Professor
Lieb
Room 301
Phone: 201.216.5608
Fax: 201.216.8249

dnaumann@stevens.edu

Ravi Ramamoorthi, Columbia University

Many problems in computer graphics require compact and accurate representations of the appearance of objects, and the mathematical algorithms to manipulate them. For instance, high quality real-time rendering needs models for appearance effects like natural illumination from wide-area light sources such as skylight, realistic material properties like velvet, satin, paints, or wood, and shading effects like soft shadows. These effects are also importa ...read more

Wenliang (Kevin) Du, Syracuse University

Randomization has emerged as a useful technique for data disguising in privacy-preserving data mining. It has been pointed out that randomization might not be able to preserve privacy to the degree that we have expected. However, it is still unclear what factors cause such a security breach, how they affect the privacy-preserving property of the randomization, and what kinds of data have higher risk of disclosing their private contents even th ...read more

Some of the very same properties that give ciphers their cryptographic strength also cause throughput reduction when operating in an interference prone wireless network. Therefore there is a fundamental trade-off between encryption based security and achievable throughput in secure wireless networks. This trade-off has not yet been explored in a comprehensive or systematic manner.

In this talk we present a mathematical framework to analyze the security vs. throughput trade-off. Using deterministic ...read more

For more information please contact:

Professor Rajarathnam Chandramouli
Hattrick Chair Professor (RESEARCH INTERESTS: Cognitive radio networks, wireless security, steganography, steganalysis, computational biology)
Burchard Building
Room 315
Phone: 201.216.8642
Fax: 201.216.8246

rchandr1@stevens.edu

Phong Vo, AT&T Labs - Research

A data transform is a software module taking a chunk of data and changing it in some way to produce new data. As such, it can represent various aspects of data processing including compression, encryption, codeset translation (e.g., between ASCII and EBCDIC), etc. In this talk, I'll discuss Vcodex, a platform of data transforms, from three different engineering perspectives: data, software and algorithm. I'll show how the Vcodex a ...read more

Shai Halevi, IBM T.J. Watson

The main objective of this report is to bridge the different notions of security that are used in common cryptographic models and in common models of access control. Very roughly, cryptographic models usually assume that the communication channels are adversarially controlled, but some of the participants can be trusted to honestly follow the protocol. The notion of security in such models is meant to protect these honest participants, and it is typically ...read more

Leo Grady, Siemans Corporate Research

An ideal segmentation algorithm could be applied equally to the problem of isolating organs in a medical volume or to editing a digital photograph without modifying the algorithm, changing parameters, or sacrificing segmentation quality. However, a general-purpose, multiway segmentation of objects in an image/volume remains a challenging problem. In this talk, I will describe a recently developed approach to this problem that inputs a few training p ...read more

Bharat Bhargava, Purdue University

Lack of trust, privacy, security, and reliability impedes information sharing among distributed entities. My research work focuses on the creation of knowledge and learning in secure networking, systems, and applications. The fundamental research problems include: intruder identification, trust management, privacy preserved interactions, and dealing with a variety of attacks and frauds. The integrated results will provide guidelines for the design and d ...read more

Alexei Myasnikov, CUNY and McGill

Applications of mathematical methods to cryptography is one of the most rapidly developing areas of interdisciplinary research in mathematics and computer science. Current situation with information security unambiguously indicates that such interest to cryptography will be just getting stronger in the years to come. In this talk I would like to discuss the increasing influence of new methods and ideas that come to mathematics from modern informati ...read more

Johannes Buchmann, Darmstadt University of Technology

Digital signatures play an important role in securing computer networks. All digital signature schemes used today are broken when sufficiently large quantum computers can be built. I present possible alternatives and describe their status with respect to efficiency and security.

Co-sponsored by Laboratory for Secure Systems, ...read more

Dinesh Pai, Rutgers University

Humans experience the world with all their senses, including vision, touch, and hearing. Therefore, human interfaces should provide not just images, but correlated multisensory information that is both realistic and responsive to interaction. I will describe how we can construct such multisensory environments with integrated graphics, haptics, and sounds. I will describe how we can construct physically based models suitable for multisensory interactive simu ...read more

Thorsten Altenkirch, University of Nottingham

Quantum programming tries to exploit the strange properties of quantum physics to run programs much faster than on any conventional hardware. A famous quantum algorithm is Shor's factorisation algorithm, which entails that on a quantum computer we can crack cryptosystems like RSA.

While nobody has yet built quantum hardware of interesting size, we are already trying to understand how to program quantum computers. Most of these ap ...read more

David Mazières, New York University

Storage systems typically trust some amount of infrastructure to behave correctly--the network, a file server, a certificate authority. Many interpret "protecting data" to mean building a security fence around this trusted infrastructure. Unfortunately, people frequently fail to build high enough fences. Moreover, high fences inconvenience people by limiting the ways in which they can access, update, and manage data.

An alt ...read more

Klaus Mueller, SUNY Stony Brook

The objective of this project is to develop a next-generation active solution for simulating, predicting, and visualizing the propagation of airborne contaminants in complex urban environments with embedded sensors using graphics hardware acceleration and sophisticated numerical methods to model multi-component flow dynamics in real-time.

In this work, we employ a relatively new computational fluid dynamics model, the Lattice Boltzmann Method ...read more

Farooq Anjum, Telcordia

Wireless access networks are rapidly becoming a part of the ubiquitous computing environment whether based on 802.11 LANS in enterprise networks and public hot spots or based on wireless ad hoc networks, often times deployed in infrastructure-less environments. In this talk, we will focus on the problem of intrusion detection and recovery in ad-hoc wireless networks. We consider networks with multiple, mobile intruders. We investigate the placement of the intrusi ...read more