Publications

Software-defined networking (SDN) achieves a programmable control plane through the use of logically centralized, event-driven controllers and through network applications (apps) that extend the controllers' functionality. As control plane decisions are often based on the data plane, it is possible for carefully crafted malicious data plane inputs to direct the...

While the number of IoT devices grows at an exhilarating pace their security remains stagnant. Imposing secure coding standards across all vendors is infeasible. Testing individual devices allows an analyst to evaluate their security post deployment. Any discovered vulnerabilities can then be disclosed to the vendors in order to assist...

This tutorial explains a systematic approach of co-designing functionality and security into mission-criticalembedded systems. The tutorial starts by reviewing common issues in embedded applications to define mission objectives,threat models, and security/resilience goals. We then introduce an overview of security technologies toachieve goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability given design criteria...

Many control-flow-hijacking attacks rely on information leakage to disclose the location of gadgets. To address this, several leakage-resilient defenses, have been proposed that fundamentally limit the power of information leakage. Examples of such defenses include address-space re-randomization, destructive code reads, and execute-only code memory. Underlying all of these defenses is...

A cyber system could be viewed as an architecture consisting of application software, system software, and system hardware. The hardware layer, being at the foundation of the overall architecture, must be secure itself and also provide effective security features to the software layers. In order to seamlessly integrate security hardware...

Under the Navy's Flexible Cyber-Secure Radio (FlexCSR) program, the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory are jointly developing a unique cybersecurity solution for tactical unmanned systems (UxS): the FlexCSR Security/Cyber Module (SCM) End Cryptographic Unit (ECU). To deal with possible loss of unmanned...

Bolted is a new architecture for bare-metal clouds that enables tenants to control tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. Security-sensitive tenants can minimize their trust in the public cloud provider and achieve similar levels of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers. At the...

Attacks on real-time embedded systems can endanger lives and critical infrastructure. Despite this, techniques for securing embedded systems software have not been widely studied. Many existing security techniques for general-purpose computers rely on assumptions that do not hold in the embedded case. This paper focuses on one such technique, control-flow...

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are increasingly targeted in high-profile cyber attacks. Examples of such attacks include Stuxnet, which targeted nuclear centrifuges; Crashoverride, and Triton, which targeted power grids; and the Mirai botnet, which targeted internet-of-things (IoT) devices such as cameras to carry out a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks...

An in-depth understanding of microelectronics assurance in Department of Defense (DoD) missions is increasingly important as the DoD continues to address supply chain challenges. Many studies take a "bottom-up" approach, in which vulnerabilities are assessed in terms of general-purpose usage. This is beneficial in developing a general knowledge foundation. However...