Review of  selected 5-minutes talks from the
Security and Privacy Symposium 2007,
Oakland/Berkeley, California
May 20-23, 2007

Summaries by Tom Hinke
07/17/07

FIND (Future Internet Design)
Darleen Fisher, NSF program manager.

NSF is interested in research topics not constrained by features of the current Internet and seeks input from all sources (not just potential PIs). Check NSF CISE Directorate pages or the program manager for more information.

Cyber Trust
Karl Levitt, NSF program manager.

His program areas include GENI and FIND. He is interested in research that looks ar into the future. Congress wants solutions to spam and phishing. NSF provides 86% of computer security research money.

GENI - Global Environment of Networking Innovations, which will use state-of-the-art technology. Grand challenge competition to eliminate spam, support internet voting, support for unhackable servers.

Held a Safe Computing workshop in November 2006.

Check NSF CISE Directorate pages or the program manager for more information.

SEED: Developing a Suite of Instructional Labs for Computer Security
Wenliang (Kevin) Du, Syracuse University

This is an NSF funded project to develop laboratory for computer security teaching. Labs support rule-based-access-control, capabilities, encrypted file system, access control lists, sandbox, IPSec, mandatory access control, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, vulnerabilities.

Verification Across Intellectual Property Boundaries,
Helmut Veith, Technical University Munich

This addresses how to do verification of software without viewing source code. See their CAV07 (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/staff/chaki/publications/CAV-2007.html) paper.

Whitelisting: the Future of Intrusion Detection
Kevin Borders

This is an approach to security that tries to identify all good activities, and then flag everything else. See http://www.webtapsecurity.com . Every organization will have a different white list, while blacklists are usually the same for everyone. Mimicry is the problem - bad looking like good. See their CCS 2004 paper, Web Tap: Detecting Covert Web Traffic.

Development of Compositionally Verifiable Trustworthy Systems
Rance Delong

This is the use of separation kernels as originally suggested by John Rusby. Mentioned that there was a separation kernel Common Criteria Protection Profile. Also mentioned that separation kernels are actually being used or proposed for some next-generation DoD aircraft projects, such as the F-22 and F-35. There exists a draft Common Criteria Protection Profile [http://niap.bahialab.com/pp/draft_pps/pp_draft_skpp_hr_v0.621.pdf] for separation kernels entitled "U.S. Government Protection Profile for Separation Kernels in Environments Requiring High Robustness."

The following taken from this Protection Profile provides a good description of the function of a separation kernel: "Unlike the traditional Security Kernel that performs all trusted functions for a secure operating system, a Separation Kernel's primary security function is to partition (viz. separate) the subjects and resources of a system into policy-based equivalence classes, and to control information flows between partitions. The partitions and information flow policies are defined by the Separation Kernel's configuration data. A Separation Kernel evaluated against this PP provides the trusted foundation for use in security critical and complex applications whose security requirements are not addressed by this PP."

Note that separation kernels can be used for more that separation of processing by confidentiality levels. It can also be used to separate processing for integrity.  

CyberCIEGE: A Computer Security Video Game
Cynthia Irvine, Naval Postgraduate School

A SIM-like computer security game in which players attempt to defend their virtual sites against malicious activities. See http://cisr.nps.edu/cyberciege/