Engineering Papers⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Prowell, Stacy

Publications and source records attributed to Prowell, Stacy.

Position Papers for the ASCR Workshop on Cybersecurity and Privacy for Scientific Computing Ecosystems

At the request of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), this program committee has been tasked with organizing a workshop to identify basic research needs in cybersecurity and privacy to better support DOE's science and energy mission. As part of the process, the program committee is soliciting community input in the form of position papers to help identify significant use cases, facility issues, and other barriers to enabling verifiably trustworthy computational science while preserving data confidentiality as appropriate for scientific workflows of interest to DOE. The program committee will review these position papers and based on the fit of their area of expertise and interest, selected contributors will have the opportunity to participate in the workshop currently planned as a virtual event November 3-5th, 2021. The thrust areas that will be explored by this workshop are the following: (1) Algorithms for secure, scalable, privacy-enhancing technologies and frameworks, including: Federated AI/ML, Differential privacy, Randomized algorithms, Adversarial modeling & simulation, Graph algorithms, and Formal methods; (2) Platforms to support the entire scientific-computing ecosystem, including edge computing for large-scale experiments, focusing on heterogeneous systems and distributed systems, including: Heterogeneous computing systems, Distributed computing systems, and Secure data architectures; and (3) Data workflows to allow agile use of data while preserving integrity and privacy, making the important properties verifiable either at runtime or post-computation, including: Integrity and provenance and Data management infrastructure. Topics that are out-of-scope for the workshop include discussing specific proposed solutions or areas that are clearly out of DOE's fundamental and applied-sciences mission scope, e.g., cryptography, enterprise security, and general-operations technology.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Use of Thermistor Temperature Sensors for Cyber-Physical System Security

The last few decades have seen a large proliferation in the prevalence of cyber-physical systems. This has been especially highlighted by the explosive growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Unfortunately, the increasing prevalence of these devices has begun to draw the attention of malicious entities which exploit them for their own gain. What makes these devices especially attractive is the various resource constraints present in these devices that make it difficult to add standard security features. Therefore, one intriguing research direction is creating security solutions out of already present components such as sensors. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are one potential solution that use intrinsic variations of the device manufacturing process for provisioning security. In this work, we propose a novel weak PUF design using thermistor temperature sensors. Our design uses the differences in resistance variation between thermistors in response to temperature change. To generate a PUF that is reliable across a range of temperatures, we use a response-generation algorithm that helps mitigate the effects of temperature variation on the thermistors. We tested the performance of our proposed design across a range of environmental operating conditions. From this we were able to evaluate the reliability of the proposed PUF with respect to variations in temperature and humidity. We also evaluated the PUF’s uniqueness using Monte Carlo simulations.

Internet of Things (IoT)↗

2018 Technology Innovation Program Heartbeat

Heartbeat responds to this problem by focusing instead on the physical behavior of the device being protected, under the hypothesis that malware infection will produce a measurable change in the power consumption state of a device that can be picked up by an outside detector. All code execution uses power, so the execution of malware—especially polymorphic variants—will leave a trace on a power consumption record. The Heartbeat system collects power trace measurements directly from the hardware and so is invisible to malware and resilient to internet service interruption. By collecting power measurement data only during the periodic invocation of a single or of several system functions, Heartbeat will address several challenges that plague current anomaly-based intrusion detection systems and is operational-context agnostic.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hyperion

The Hyperion system was designed to "look inside" an executable program and determine software's function or "behavior" without the use of the software's source code. Hyperion accomplishes this by generating associated program behaviors and the complete set of conditions under which they occur. These behaviors can be automatically checked for known malicious signatures and inspected by domain experts to assure correct operation and the absence of malicious content. Hyperion can also be used to check a program's security properties and to optimize a program.

Prowell, Stacy↗