Gene Tsudik
University of California-Irvine, CA·Computer Science
Everyday connected devices now do safety-critical jobs: insulin pumps that sense blood sugar and deliver a dose, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, emergency lighting, water sensors, shutoff valves and automated sprinklers. All of these have been targets of sophisticated attacks, and a compromised device can threaten privacy, security and physical safety.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
embedded security
Internet of Things
IoT
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2029
What they work on
- Define an execution model for safelets, small safety-critical programs that must run no matter what, and formally verify the safety monitor responsible for executing them.
- Build hardware support for a Guaranteed Execution Environment (GEE), using existing hardware components where possible and designing new hardware primitives where needed.
- Develop software support and developer tools that let programmers reason about the resource requirements, such as time and memory, of safelets running inside a GEE.
- Prototype and experiment with concrete safelet use cases from distinct application domains, such as insulin delivery or smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, to assess the practicality and benefits of GEEs.
More about the research
Because the software and firmware on such devices is complex and changes quickly, keeping attackers out entirely is unrealistic. This project takes a different stance: assume a device may be fully compromised, and guarantee anyway that its handful of truly essential tasks still run.
Why it matters
Medical devices, fire and gas alarms, utility meters and water shutoff systems are routinely attacked, and failures can endanger people rather than just data. Guaranteeing that a device's few life-critical functions keep working even after compromise could make these systems substantially more reliable, giving device makers and hospitals, buildings and utilities a way to limit the physical harm an intrusion can cause.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ning Zhang
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Computer Science·Early-career
Provide guaranteed computing and I/O availability inside trusted execution environments despite an untrusted operating system, using the predictable timing of real-time cyber-physical systems to keep the trusted code small.
Radu Sion
Stony Brook University, NY·Computer Science
Design plausibly deniable storage systems that hide the existence of data from a multi-snapshot attacker, one who inspects a device repeatedly, while holding the user's devices and credentials.
Jelena Mirkovic
University of Southern California, CA·Computer Science
Build SPHERE, a shared research infrastructure with diverse hardware, configurable networks and safe network policies, for reproducible cybersecurity and privacy experiments on IoT, edge computing and programmable networks.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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