csstalk

Victor Morel's introductory talk - Design and analysis of technical systems for humans

Victor will present in this introductory talk his past work on informed consent in the IoT, and his research perspectives for the CyberSecIT project. The first part of his presentation will summarize his PhD work, including a short video demonstration. The second part will introduce his interdisciplinary experience within the Sustainable Computing Lab in Vienna on the standardization of consent in the IoT. Finally, the third part will expose his research perspectives for the CyberSecIT project with the iSec group at Chalmers.

Practical problems in enforcing Data Protection by Design & by Default - the perspective of a Data Protection Authority

Marit will explain various difficulties of enforcing Art. 25 GDPR from the perspective of a supervisory authority. She will compare the deficiencies in this area with the situation of implementing "security-by-design" approaches. Also, current trends stemming from technology design and from recent court decisions will be discussed concerning their relevance for compliance with data protection requirements. To achieve built-in data protection, Marit will present her "wish list" that addresses stakeholders such as researchers, developers, academic teachers, data protection officers, lawyers and the data protection authorities themselves.

CatNap: a Protocol for Server-aided Proximity Testing

In this talk we will look at the protocol that allows two parties who know their locations on a Euclidean plane to check whether they are within distance R of each other or not. A distinguishing feature of this protocol is that it does not require the parties to communicate with each other directly and be online at the same time. We introduce a pair of servers to which one client may submit their data and go offline with the other client coming online later, finishing the protocol and fetching the matching result. We build the protocols by combining existing off-the-shelf Cryptographic techniques. Interestingly, the protocol has better parameters (w.r.t. performance and security) than some of the hand-crafted protocols. So the importance of our protocol is in showing what can be achieved in this field “for free” using the generic techniques, and setting the bar for anyone who tries to make a “smarter” protocol for this problem in the future. During the talk we will have an intro to how Multi-Party Computation protocols work, then show how our CatNap is built from them, and finally discuss the practical implications of this work.

TypeScript Analysis in Prime Video

TypeScript is a typed version of JavaScript widely used across Amazon, but poses challenges for static analysis: The language supports many intricate features used in practice, such as callbacks and higher-order functions, dynamic field access, and asynchronous code. At the same time, the size of industrial code bases such as the Prime Video application makes a highly precise whole-program analysis intractable. In this talk, we present how we approach this trade-off in Prime Video with a lightweight whole-program analysis followed by a more precise goal-directed analysis of potential bug locations. Our goal-directed analysis uses an imprecise call graph and points-to information generated upfront to guide a more expensive goal-directed analysis that attempts to prove that potential bugs cannot happen via abstract interpretation backed by an SMT solver.

Adventures in program synthesis

This talk will be about ongoing work on developing new program synthesis techniques. One of the applications is to find programs that break type soundness, given a type system and a semantics. I will show that some [challenges of the IFC](https://ifc-challenge.appspot.com/) can be solved automatically in this way.

Towards usable differentially private analyses — Exploring suitable metaphors for lay users

We present our work on the suitability of the metaphors for aiding informed decisions of data subjects on sharing their data with differential privacy (DP) systems and discuss open research challenges.

LogPicker: Strengthening Certificate Transparency Against Covert Adversaries

HTTPS is a cornerstone of privacy in the modern Web. The public key infrastructure underlying HTTPS, however, is a frequent target of attacks. We introduce LogPicker, a novel protocol for strengthening the public key infrastructure of HTTPS. LogPicker enables a pool of Certificate Transparency (CT) logs to collaborate, where a randomly selected log includes the certificate while the rest witness and testify the certificate issuance process. As a result, CT logs become capable of auditing the log in charge independently without the need for a trusted third party.

End-to-End Security for Evolved Computer Systems

Computer systems have evolved beyond classical notions of personal computers, servers and even smartphones. They are distributed, embedded, capable of learning and can modify our perception of the physical world. Securing such systems requires an end-to-end perspective. I will demonstrate the utility of this perspective by discussing my recent results on: (1) building least-privilege distributed systems with applications to the Internet of Things; and (2) establishing threat models for systems that learn.

With a Little Help from My Friends: Transport Deniability for Instant Messaging

Traffic analysis for instant messaging (IM) applications continues to pose an important privacy challenge. In particular, transport-level data can leak unintentional information about IM – such as who communicates with whom. Existing tools for metadata privacy have adoption obstacles, including the risks of being scrutinized for having a particular app installed, and performance overheads incompatible with mobile devices.

On Progressive and Efficient Verification of Digital Signatures

Common verification procedures for digital signatures return a decision (accept/reject) only at the very end of the execution. If interrupted prematurely, however, the verification process cannot infer any meaningful information about the validity of the given signature. This limitation is due to the algorithm design solely, and it is not inherit to signature verification. In this talk, I will present a formal framework to handle interruptions during signature verification and a generic way to devise alternative verification procedures that progressively build confidence on the final decision. Our transformation applies to a wide range of post-quantum secure schemes including the NIST finalist Rainbow.