Author: Emerald Knox (Emerald Knox)

Stephen McLaughlin, Charalambos Konstantinou, Xueyang Wang, Lucas Davi, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Michail Maniatakos, and Ramesh Karri Industrial control systems (ICSs) are transitioning from legacy-electromechanical-based systems to modern information and communication technology (ICT)-based systems creating a close coupling between cyber and physical components. In this paper, we explore the ICS cybersecurity landscape including: 1) the key principles and unique aspects of ICS operation;...

Jeyavijayan (JV) Rajendran, Ozgur Sinanoglu, and Ramesh Karri Trustworthiness of system-on-chip designs is undermined by malicious logic (Trojans) in third-party intellectual properties (3PIPs). In this paper, duplication, diversity, and isolation principles have been extended to detect build trustworthy systems using untrusted, potentially Trojan-infected 3PIPs.

Mohammad Karami, Youngsam Park, and Damon McCoy DDoS-for-hire services, also known as booters, have commoditized DDoS attacks and enabled abusive subscribers of these services to cheaply extort, harass and intimidate businesses and people by taking them offline. However, due to the underground nature of these booters, little is known about their underlying technical and business...

Xueyang Wang, Sek Chai , Michael Isnardi , Sehoon Lim , and Ramesh Karri Hardware Performance Counter-based (HPC) runtime checking is an effective way to identify malicious behaviors of malware and detect malicious modifications to a legitimate program’s control flow. To reduce the overhead in the monitored system which has limited storage and computing resources,...

Sai Teja Peddinti, Keith W. Ross, and Justin Cappos We explore the feasibility of automatically finding accounts that publish sensitive content on Twitter, by examining the percentage of anonymous and identifiable followers the accounts have. We first designed a machine learning classifier to automatically determine if a Twitter account is anonymous or identifiable. We then...

Jeyavijayan Rajendran, A Dhandayuthapany, Ramesh Karri, V Vedula Globalization of the system-on-chip (SoC) design flow has created opportunities for rogue intellectual property (IP) vendors to insert malicious circuits (a.k.a. hardware Trojans) into their IPs. We propose to formally verify third party IPs (3PIPs) for unauthorized information leakage. We validate our technique using Trojan benchmarks from...

Tao Zhang and Quanyan Zhu Privacy-preserving distributed machine learning becomes increasingly important due to the recent rapid growth of data. This paper focuses on a class of regularized empirical risk minimization (ERM) machine learning problems, and develops two methods to provide differential privacy to distributed learning algorithms over a network.

Minhui Xue, Limin Yang,  Keith W. Ross, and Haifeng Qian In this paper, we explore: (i) if one gender tends to use the People Nearby service more than another; (ii) if users of People Nearby are more anonymous than ordinary WeChat users; (iii) if ordinary WeChat users are more anonymous than Twitter users. We also take an in-depth examination of the user...

Juntao Chen and Quanyan Zhu Designing optimal interdependent networks is important for the robustness and efficiency of national critical infrastructures. Here, we establish a two-person game-theoretic model in which two network designers choose to maximize the global connectivity independently. This framework enables decentralized network design by using iterative algorithms.

Sheharbano Khattak, David Fifield, Sadia Afroz, Mobin Javed, Srikanth Sundaresan, Vern Paxson, Steven J. Murdoch, and Damon McCoy The utility of anonymous communication is undermined by a growing number of websites treating users of such services in a degraded fashion…We conduct the first study to methodically enumerate and characterize the treatment of anonymous users as...