Wei Le (Co-PI), joint with Suraj Kothari(PI) and Srikanta Tirthapura (Co-PI) from the ECE department, and Jeremías Sauceda from EnSoft (Co-PI), receives a $4.65 million DARPAR award (contract FA8750-15-2-0080) to develop a system to detect resource usage vulnerabilities within software. The award is through the DARPA Space/Time Analysis for Cybersecurity (STAC) program, with program manager Timothy Fraser.
The project aims to detect side channels and denial of service vulnerabilities related to algorithmic complexity. Leveraging these vulnerabilities, the attackers can steal secrets and use small inputs to exhaust computation resources. The work will develop mathematical models for space time complexity and program analysis techniques, including loop summary, path-equivalence identification and graph query mechanisms to better amplify human intelligence for solving this hard problem.
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