Stevens Institute of Technology

Hoboken, New Jersey

Friday, November 16, 2007

Program:

  • 08:30 - 09:30 Registration and Breakfast
  • 09:30 - 09:35 Opening Remarks
  • 09:35 - 10:45 Keynote Talk: Andrew W. Appel (Princeton University)
    The Computer in the Voting Booth
    Abstract:
    Citizens of democracies vote using procedures and technologies that have changed over the past 250 years. In response to abuse and manipulation of one procedure or technology, a new one is introduced. In the 19th century, the preprinted secret ballot was introduced to combat voter intimidation; in the early 20th century, mechanical lever-action machines combated paper-ballot fraud.

    In the mid-20th century, Turing and von Neumann outlined the general-purpose stored-program computer, capable of performing or simulating any computation, and within a few decades computers were used to count votes. We would like to know that the votes are counted accurately, even though there are substantial incentives to cheat. We can apply basic principles of computer security to see why this problem is so difficult; we can compare with solved problems (bank ATM machines) and unsolved problems (digital rights management).
  • 10:45 - 11:00 Break
  • 11:00 - 11:30 Sven Dietrich (Stevens Institute of Technology)
    Malware Evolution: From Handler/Agent to P2P
    Abstract:
    We look at the evolution of Internet attack tools that use a command and control structure. The efficiency of such tools has improved since the first major attacks in 1999. While the public was not aware of distributed attacks until the February 2000 attacks on major websites, nowadays a lot of attention and research is focused on their successors, called botnets, due to the wide range of criminal activity associated with them. The impact of the command and control mechanisms present in these modern tools on intrusion detection and network monitoring is examined with the help of recent examples of bots.
  • 11:30 - 12:00 Juan Garay (Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent)
    Sound and Fine-grain Specification of Security Tasks
    Abstract:
    Recently there has been an interest in the design of cryptographic protocols satisfying strong security properties, such as (preservation of security under) concurrency and non-malleability. The Universal Composability (UC) framework of Canetti fulfills that interest, by guaranteeing that if a protocol is able to emulate an ideal specification of the task (called a "functionality" in the framework -- e.g., signature, public-key encryption, zero-knowledge, etc.), then those properties are achieved. However, while the traditional (non-UC) security notions of many tasks have been studied for a while and are well understood, their UC formulation has been error-prone, leading to "unstable" definitions.

    In this talk, we propose a general methodology for the translation of the traditional security definitions to their UC counterpart, which besides the sound specification of cryptographic tasks, allows for the easy identification of relations between functionalities, as well as the "debugging" of existing ones. Instrumental in our methodology is a formal language-based description of functionalities, which might be of independent interest.

    This is joint work with Aggelos Kiayias and Hong-Sheng Zhou (UConn).
  • 12:00 - 02:00 Lunch Break
  • 02:00 - 02:30 Salvatore J. Stolfo (Columbia University)
    Content-based Anomaly Detection in Instrusion Detection
    Abstract:
    There are many anti-virus and intrusion detection systems in wide use that are primarily signature-based detectors. They detect what is already known to be bad by matching a signature pattern against input. These systems have been effective at detecting known exploits and intrusion attempts but they fail to recognize new attacks and carefully crafted variants of old exploits. Anomaly Detection has been proposed as an alternative strategy for detecting new attacks. Anomaly Detectors model what is known to be good in order to detect deviations that are presumed to be bad. Anomaly Detection systems that analyze network flow level statistics have been the subject of research for several years and some are now appearing in commercial products.

    Content-based Anomaly Detection systems that utilize machine learning algorithms are designed to model normal content for a distinct site or host. These systems are designed to detect content deviations of interest that may indicate the presence of malcode that otherwise would not be detected by conventional (and soon to be obsolete) signature-based detectors. In the continuing battle between attacker and defender, Anomaly Detectors can also be thwarted by a variety of obfuscation methods. In this talk we will provide an overview of the state of the art in content-based Anomaly Detection in intrusion detection, describe various approaches to blind these detectors, and propose new approaches to counter these evasion tactics based upon randomization strategies to blind the attacker.
  • 02:30 - 03:00 Break
  • 03:00 - 03:30 Larry Koved, Ted Habeck (IBM Research)
    Making Security Accessible to Programmers
    Abstract:
    We take a look at secure application development from the perspective of application programmers. These programmers often lack a security background, yet are required to deliver secure applications. Programming languages, models and tools are increasingly making it easier to create and deploy new applications in less time, with increasing functionality. These technologies also made it easier (and faster) to create security holes. This talk reviews some of the significant security challenges programmers face, and describes SWORD4J, a technology we have been developing to lighten the secure code development burden.
  • 03:30 - 04:00 Antonio Nicolosi (Stevens Institute of Technology)
    Deterring Piracy in Live Event Transmissions
    Abstract:
    Traitor tracing schemes are multi-recipient public-key encryption schemes where each user holds a personalized decryption key. In the transmission of live events, they constitute an effective tool to deter piracy by ``fear of exposure'': If a group of subscribers collude to construct a pirate decoder, a specialized tracing algorithm will uncover the source of the leakage by observing the pirate decoder's decryption of well-crafted ciphertexts.

    We present a traitor tracing scheme in which the ratio of ciphertext and plaintext lengths is asymptotically 1, thus enabling an optimal usage of the bandwidth allocated for the transmission. Our treatment improves upon conventional tracing modeling by additionally accounting for pirate strategies that attempt to escape tracing by purposedly rendering decrypted content at lower quality (e.g., by dropping every other frame from the video stream, or by suppressing the audio channel from the transmission).
  • 04:00 -       Concluding Remarks