CS 7123 Research Seminar -- Syllabus

Chia-Tien Dan Lo, Ph.D.

Fall 2005

Course Web: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~danlo/teaching/cs7123/syllabus.htm

Department of Computer Science

University of Texas at San Antonio

TR 2:00 - 3:15 p.m., 1604 Campus

Room: SB 4.01.20 CS Meeting Room or otherwise specified

 

Instructor information:

Office: SB 3.01.10

Office Hours: TR 8:15-9:15 p.m.

Phone: x7433

Email: danlo@ieee.org URL: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~danlo

Course Description: 3 hours. 6 hours are required for Ph.D. in Computer Science. Presentation and analysis of literature in a selected area of research. May be repeated, but only 6 hours will count toward the Ph.D.  requirements. 

Course Objectives: Review, present and critique recent research publication in areas of interest to the Computer Science Department. Learning research methods, presentation and communication skills.

Textbook: N/A

Implementation: Each student in the class will take turns to do presentations.  Some of the classes may be given to speakers  from CS faculty or other universities. Therefore, a student may only present a couple of times but attending all classes is required. Typically, a  research paper will be selected from IEEE or ACM digital libraries published  in last 3 years (2003-2005). The paper has to be full-length, i.e., more than 6 pages, not abstract or extended abstract. Finding papers is never be easier. Follow the link, http://www.lib.utsa.edu/, and click on "Databases A-Z". For ACM, click on "ACM Digital Library"; for IEEE, click on "IEEE Xplore/IEE Electronic Library Online (IEL)." Students should discuss with the instructor if there is difficulty in finding a topic. Once a paper is identified, carefully read it through several times. Identify key issues depicted in the paper and refer to other papers through references if some concepts are not clear. Through cross reference, the idea described in the paper would be fully understood. PowerPoint slides can then be made to address key items as follows: 

Motivation: Why bother?

Key issues: What are the problems?

Solutions: What are the new proposed solutions and their technical details?

Comparisons: What are other solutions out there and what's good/bad about it?

Possible improvement: Where in the proposed solution can be improved?

It is worth reading some PowerPoint Presentation techniques before making slides. However, it is the scientific, technical detailed content of a presentation that is never be overemphasized not the slides themselves!

Grading and Policies:

There are three components of the final letter grade: class attendance (40%), presentation (slides) (30%), and participation (30%). Students are required to sign in every class except for university-sanctioned absences. A hardcopy of slides will be turned in before each presentation. Students are required to participate in each discussion right after each presentation. The class attendance will be calculated based on the formula: class attendance component = 40 - (number of absences)^3. The points to grade ration is as follows:

A: 90-100

B: 70-89

F: otherwise.

Presentation Schedule (Default class room* is SB 4.01.20 CS Conference Room):

Note 1: This schedule might change. Please read it before go to the class.

Title:       The N-Variant Systems Framework: Polygraphing Processes for
Secretless Security
Speaker:     David Evans, Assistant Professor
Affiliation: University of Virginia
When:        Oct. 4, 2:00-3:30PM
Where:       BSB 3.03.02
Host:        Xu

Abstract:

The current computing monoculture leaves our infrastructure vulnerable
to a massive, rapid attack. One technique that has been proposed to mitigate this
threat is to artificially increase software diversity by transforming programs to
produce diverse executables. These techniques depend on keeping a key used to
control the transformation secret from potential attackers.  Previous techniques
have used artificial diversity in a way that depends on keeping a key secret
from attacker.

In the first part of this talk, I will discuss one proposed diversification technique, instruction set randomization (ISR), and describe our work on evaluating its security.
ISR defuses all standard code injection attacks by hiding the instruction set of the
target machine from the attacker. A motivated attacker may be able to circumvent
ISR by determining the randomization key. I will describe a remote attack for
determining an ISR key using an incremental guessing strategy and present a method
for injecting a worm in an ISR-protected network. The attack is plausible under
realistic conditions and can infect an ISR-protected server in under 6 minutes.

In the second part of the talk, I will introduce the N-variant systems framework
that uses artificial diversity to enhance security. Unlike previous approaches
such as ISR, it does not rely on keeping any secrets. Instead, the framework
requires an attacker to compromise one of the system variants without producing
detectable behavior on another system variant processing the same input.
By constructing variants with disjoint exploitation sets, we can make it impossible
to successfully carry out large classes of important attacks. In this talk, I will describe our framework and prototype implementations, identify some useful variations, and introduce a model for analyzing security properties of N-variant systems.

Note: This talk includes joint work with Ben Cox, Jack Davidson, Adrian
Filipi, John Knight, Anh Nguyen-Tuong, Nathanael Paul, Jonathan Rowanhill, and
Nora Sovarel funded by grants from DARPA (SRS program) and NSF (Cyber Trust).

Title:       Secure Range-Independent Localization for Wireless Sensor
Networks
Speaker:     Rada Poovendra, Assistant Professor
Affiliation: University of Washington
When:        Oct. 18, 2:00-3:30PM
Where:       BSB 3.03.02
Host:        Xu

Abstract:

In many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensors are deployed
un-tethered in hostile environments. For location aware WSN applications,
it is essential to ensure that sensors can determine their location, even in
the presence of malicious adversaries. In this talk we address the problem of
enabling sensors of WSN to determine their location in an un-trusted environment.
Since localization schemes based on distance estimation are expensive for the
resource-constrained sensors, we propose a range-independent localization
algorithm called SeRLoc. SeRLoc is distributed algorithm and does not require
any communication among sensors. In addition, we show that SeRLoc is robust
against severe WSN attacks, such as the wormhole attack, the Sybil attack and
compromised sensors. We present a threat analysis and comparison of the
performance of SeRLoc with state-of-the-art range-independent localization schemes.
We also present a high-resolution extension to SeRLoc provide a number of
methods for robust estimation of location. We will also discuss some of
the hard problems that remain open.