Security

Security involves safeguarding software systems, embedded systems IoT (Internet of Things), mobile systems, and cyber-physical systems from threats such as software vulnerabilities, attacks, and other types of malicious and harmful activity. CISE researchers apply a variety of techniques from a number of fields (program analysis, machine learning, computational social science) to better understand such systems and the way in which people interact with them and misuse them. Research in CISE includes development of automated dynamic malware-analysis techniques and tools to analyze potentially malicious samples. Another line of research involves hardening the security of wireless ingestible and implantable medical devices (IMDs), such as on-demand drug delivery systems and bio-engineered wireless medical sensors, for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Arslan Riaz awarded COMSNETS 2022 Best Research Demo Award

Arslan Riaz, PhD candidate (ECE), won the “Best Research Demo” award at the 14th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS 2022) January 3-8, 2022. Riaz demonstrated the first fully-integrated universal Maximum Likelihood Decoder in 40 nm CMOS using the Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) algorithm. This novel technology provides a universal system for […]

Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: ONSET: Optics-enabled Network Defenses for Extreme Terabit DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to present a clear and imminent danger to critical network infrastructures. DDoS attacks have increased in sophistication with advanced strategies to continuously adapt (e.g., changing threat postures dynamically) and induce collateral damage (i.e., higher latency and loss for legitimate traffic). Furthermore, advanced attacks may also employ reconnaissance (e.g., […]

Collaborative Research: SWIFT: Facilitating Spectrum Access by Noise Guessing

Wireless technologies play an essential role in enabling growth and prosperity in societies by supporting business, government, science and education, defense, and health sectors. The boom of connected Internet of Things (IoT) nodes and 5G wireless communications will lead to a many-fold increase in wireless data traffic. This data storm and connectivity-in-everything model will result […]

Automated Analytics for Improving Efficiency, Safety, and Security of HPC Systems

Performance variations are becoming more prominent with new generations of large-scale High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Understanding these variations and developing resilience to anomalous performance behavior are critical challenges for reaching extreme-scale computing. To help address these emerging performance variation challenges, there is increasing interest in designing data analytics methods to make sense out of the […]

Tools and Techniques to Improve the Granularity and Usability of Web Application Debloating

Modern web applications are the cornerstone of much of our online life. Unfortunately, web applications are a complex mix of different technology stacks (e.g., HTML, JavaScript, and PHP), and this complexity breeds security vulnerabilities that allow an adversary to launch successful attacks. Thus, we require new approaches and techniques to tame the complexity that seems […]

Manuel Egele Receives The 2020 Early Career Research Award

Dr. Manuel Egele, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Co-director of the Boston University Secure Systems Lab, is the recipient of the 2020 Early Career Research Excellence Award. This award celebrates the significant, recent, high-impact research achievements of exemplary tenure-track faculty who are within 10 years of receiving their Ph.D. Dr. Egele’s research spans all areas of […]

Collaborative Research: CIF: Small: Toward a Science of Vehicular Epidemiology: Computing, Control, and Security

Vehicle-to-everything communication is a transformational emerging technology that is poised to enhance transportation safety and traffic management, thereby saving lives and yielding major economic gains by alleviating traffic congestion. This technology will enable vehicles to communicate with each other, as well as with traffic signals, road side units, bikes, wheelchairs, and pedestrians to augment situational […]

BU Researchers Propose Method for Controlling COVID-19 through Cellphones

CISE faculty affiliate Ari Trachtenberg along with fellow Boston University Computer Science professors Mayank Varia, and Ran Canetti recently published a paper that proposes a method for using cellphones to track COVID-19, while protecting user privacy. The researchers write: “Successful containment of the Coronavirus pandemic rests on the ability to quickly and reliably identify those […]