Abstract: Software systems are ever-growing in size and complexity while being rife with vulnerabilities. Patches and defenses are continuously deployed, but the software attack surface is extremely large and attackers invariably find ways to gain a persistent foothold. An effective way to end the arms race between vulnerabilities and defense tools is by isolating the
Abstract: Security and safety-critical remote applications such as e-voting, online banking, industrial control systems and medical devices rely upon user interaction that is typically performed through web applications. Trusted path to such remote systems is critical in the presence of an attacker that controls the user’s computer. Such an attacker can observe and modify any
Abstract: Permissionless blockchains offer many advantagesbut also have significant limitations including high latency. Thisprevents their use in important scenarios such as retail payments,where merchants should approve payments fast. Prior works haveattempted to mitigate this problem by moving transactions off thechain. However, such Layer-2 solutions have their own problems:payment channels require a separate deposit towards eachmerchant
Abstract: We present the first protocols for private information retrieval that allow fast (sublinear-time) database lookups without increasing the server-side storage requirements. To achieve these efficiency goals, our protocols work in an offline/online model. In an offline phase, which takes place before the client has decided which database bit it wants to read, the client
Abstract: Many mobile and wearable devices interact with their environment, with other devices, and with human users – and yet most of their communications occur invisibly via wireless networks. How can users express their intent about which devices should communicate – especially in situations when those devices have never encountered each other before? These devices
Abstract: The risks of cyber attacks are increasing: attackers are increasingly well organized and sophisticated; at the same time, more and more computer systems are accessible over the Internet to be attacked, including computer systems that operate critical infrastructure such as power generation and transportation. In this talk I’ll describe several recent research results that
Abstract: Today’s IoT deployments commonly resemble walled gardens: they are closed ecosystems in which manufacturers maintain significant control over devices after they have been deployed. This is typically the result of a centralized design approach where devices heavily rely on a monolithic, vendoroperated cloud service. We propose a distributed architecture that liberates these devices—and their
Abstract: Thanks to the widespread deployment of TLS, users can accessprivate data over channels with end-to-end confidentiality andintegrity. What they cannot do, however, is prove to third parties theprovenance of such data, i.e., that it genuinely came from aparticular website. Existing approaches either introduce undesirabletrust assumptions or require server-side modifications.As a result, the value of
Abstract: Since early 2018, with Spectre and Meltdown, a novel attack surface concerning speculative execution was discovered and successfully exploited. These new attacks are able to break privilege boundaries and leak sensitive data. New attacks and variants were presented ever since, but I believe much of the attack surface is still unexplored due to the
Abstract: Modern messaging protocols are highly complex as they are composed of multiple different cryptographic primitives. In order to understand the underlying security requirements, security guarantees, and mechanisms, this talk disassembles messaging into its components. The main focus will be ratcheting as a modern building block that provides security even if secrets from the communicating