Jefferson's Wheel

The New York Times has an article, How Game Apps That Captivate Kids Have Been Collecting Their Data about a lawsuit the state of New Mexico is bringing against app markets (including Google) that allow apps presented as being for children in the Play store to violate COPPA rules and mislead users into tracking children. The lawsuit stems from a study led by Serge Egleman’s group at UC Berkeley that analyzed COPPA violations in children’s apps. Serge was an undergraduate student here (back in the early 2000s) – one of the things he did as a undergraduate was successfully sue a spammer.

The original paper about the study: “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?” Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale, Irwin Reyes, Primal Wijesekera, Joel Reardon, Amit Elazari Bar On, Abbas Razaghpanah, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, and Serge Egelman. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2018.

Serge Egelman, a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, helped lead the study of nearly 6,000 children’s Android apps

Muzzammil Zaveri (BACS 2011) has been recognized by Forbes Magazine as one of the top 30 venture capitalists under 30. As an undergraduate researcher, Muzzammil worked on Guardrails (secure web application framework).

Forbes Recognition

UVa Today Article: Meet the 5 Alumni on Forbes’ new ‘30 under 30’ Lists, 15 November 2017.

Cavalier Daily Article: Forbes 30 under 30 recognizes five U.Va alumni, 4 December 2017.

Zaveri stressed the importance of pursuing passion and making positive use of free time while studying as an undergraduate.

“There’s nothing like being in a setting where you can make mistakes and explore interests,” he said. “Doing something that you’re strictly passionate about may not be the most productive — you can explore interests and area that you might be passionate about and that can be a great springboard into your own career, or whatever you decide to pursue in life after school.”

Zaveri believes he was very lucky with the connections he made at the University, especially with meeting his co-founder, Ethan Fast. He credits Evans, his advisor with empowering him with knowledge and encouraging him to learn more about tech startups.

“[Evans] really encouraged and spent time diving into startups and exploring some of my interests in building side projects,” he said. “And through that I met my co-founder [Ethan Fast] and ultimately, we ended up starting Proxino together.”

The 24^th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security was held in Dallas, 30 October – 3 November. Being Program Committee co-chair for a conference like this is a full-year commitment, and the work continues throughout much of the year preceding the conference. The conference has over 1000 registered attendees, a record for any academic security research conference.

Here are a few highlights from the conference week.

PC Chairs’ Welcome (opening session)

Giving the PC Chairs’ Welcome Talk

Audience at Opening Session

ACM CCS 2017 Paper Awards Finalists

CCS 2017 Awards Banquet

At the Award’s Banquet, I got to award a Best Paper award to SRG alum Jack Doerner (I was, of course, recused by conflict from being involved in any decisions on his paper).

UVA Lunch (around the table starting at front left): Suman Jana (honorary Wahoo by marriage), Darion Cassel (SRG BSCS 2017, now at CMU), Will Hawkins, Jason Hiser, Samee Zahur (SRG PhD 2016, now at Google), Jack Doerner (SRG BACS 2016, now at Northeastern), Joe Calandrino (now at FTC); Back right to front: Ben Kreuter (now at Google), Anh Nguyen-Tuong, Jack Davidson, Yuan Tian, Yuchen Zhou (SRG PhD 2015, now at Palo Alto Networks), David Evans.

Adrienne Porter Felt (SRG BSCS 2008) was selected as one of Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.

UVA Today has an article:Alumna-Turned-Internet Security Expert Listed Among Nation’s Top Young Innovators, UVA Today, 21 September 2017.

Felt started working in security when she was a second-year engineering student, responding to a request from computer science professor David Evans, who taught the “Program and Data Representation” course. Evans said Felt stood out amongst her peers because of her “well-thought-out answers and meticulous diagrams.”

“For the summer after her second year, she joined a project one of my Ph.D. students was working on to use the disk drive controller to detect malware based on the reads and writes it makes that are visible to the disk,” Evans said. “She did great work on that project, and by the end of the summer was envisioning her own research ideas.

“She came up with the idea of looking at privacy issues in Facebook applications, which, back in 2007, was just emerging, and no one else was yet looking into privacy issues like this.”

Taking Evans’ offer for a research project was a turning point in Felt’s life, showing her something she liked that she could do well.

“It turned out that I really loved it,” she said. “I like working in privacy and security because I enjoy helping people control their digital experiences. I think of it as, ‘I’m professionally paranoid, so that other people don’t need to be.’”

In her final semester as an undergraduate student at UVA, Felt taught a student-led class on web browsers.

“Her work at Google has dramatically changed the way web browsers convey security information to users, making the web safer for everyone,” Evans said. “Her team at Google has been studying deployment of HTTPS, the protocol that allows web clients to securely communicate with servers, and has had fantastic success in improving security of websites worldwide, as well as a carefully designed plan to use browser interfaces to further encourage adoption of secure web protocols.

Bargav Jayaraman presented on privacy-preserving sparse learning at the Private Multi‑Party Machine Learning workshop attached to NIPS 2016 in Barcelona.

A short paper summarizing the work is: Lu Tian, Bargav Jayaraman, Quanquan Gu, and David Evans. Aggregating Private Sparse Learning Models Using Multi-Party Computation [PDF, 6 pages].

At the workshop, Jack Doerner also presented a talk on An Introduction to Practical Multiparty Computation.

Great to visit our former student Joseph Calandrino at the Federal Trade Commission in DC, where he is now a Research Director.

Denis Nekipelov and I gave a joint talk there about using secure multi-party computation techniques to enable data analyses across sensitive, divided data sets in the room where the FTC commissioners meet.

Denis Nekipelov, Joseph Calandrino, David Evans, Devesh Ravel

I went to Shanghai for the ShanghaiTech Symposium on Information Science and Technology. ShanghaiTech was only founded three years ago, but has made tremendous progress and recruited a talented group of faculty and students.

Zheng Zhang and Haibo Chen

Hao Bai

For the Symposium, I presented a tutorial introduction to secure multi-party computation (focused towards systems researchers), and an invited talk on Memory for Data-Oblivious Computation. Was a special honor to be able to speak about MPC applications build using Yao’s protocol following Andrew Yao’s opening keynote.

Thanks a bunch to Hao Chen for inviting me to the Symposium!

I presented two tutorials on oblivious computation at Notre Dame’s Summer School on Secure and Oblivious Computation and Outsourcing. SRG PhD Yan Huang, now at Indiana University, was one of the other tutorial presenters. I also learned a lot about verifiable computation and argument systems from Justin Thaler. Thanks to Marina Blanton for organizing a great summer school!

Slides for my tutorials on garbling techniques and memory for data oblivious computation are below.

Top row: Anant Kharkar, Glenn Field, Ethan Robertson, David Evans, Hao Bai (BSCS 2016), Wenjiang Fan (honorary), Mohammad Etemad, Samee Zahur (PhD 2016), Jack Doerner, Weilin Xu, Longze Chen (MCS 2015), Kevin Zhao.
Front row: Mahnush Movahedi, Ziqi Liu (BACS DMP 2016), Hannah Li

Congratulations to our 2016 SRG Graduates:

Dr. Samee Zahur, PhD 2016
Dissertation: Demystifying Secure Computation: Familiar Abstractions for Efficient Protocols
Dr. Zahur will be joining Google, and working in the group that works on secure computation (broadly) led by SRG alumnus Jonathan McCune.

Hao Bai, BSCS 2016
Thesis project: Mitigating Memory Trace Side-Channels through Cache Loading
Hao will be starting graduate school at Harvard University in the fall.

Ziqi Liu, Distinguished Major with High Distinction in Computer Science (BACS) 2016
DMP project: A Proxy for Mitigating Threats from Embedded Third-party Scripts
Ziqi will be joining Microsoft (Redmond).

Karsten Nohl (SRG CpE PhD 2009) was on CBS’ 60 Minutes (April 17) as their “Moment of the Week”: Hacking into a congressman’s phone.

We heard we could find some of the world’s best hackers in Germany. So we headed for Berlin. Just off a trendy street and through this alley we rang the bell at the door of a former factory. That’s where we met Karsten Nohl, a German hacker, with a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Virginia.

Karsten demonstrated to the reporter how to track a Congressman’s location and listen in on phone conversations using SS7 vulnerabilities (for a real Congressman, Ted Liu of California, who actually has a CS degree). With permission, of course!

We wanted to see whether Nohl’s group could actually do what they claimed — so we sent an off-the-shelf iPhone from 60 Minutes in New York to Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from California. He has a computer science degree from Stanford and is a member of the House committee that oversees information technology. He agreed to use our phone to talk to his staff knowing they would be hacked and they were. All we gave Nohl, was the number of the 60 Minutes iPhone that we lent the congressman.

An excerpt from the show was also the 60 Minutes Moment of the Week.