Zhiyun QianProfessorComputer Science & Engineering zhiyunq@ucr.edu(951) 827-6438
CRII: SaTC: Analyzing and verifying the security of TCP stacks under multi-entity implementation
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AWARD NUMBER
007496-002
FUND NUMBER
33150
STATUS
Closed
AWARD TYPE
3-Grant
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AWARD EXECUTION DATE
5/11/2015
BEGIN DATE
6/1/2015
END DATE
5/31/2017
AWARD AMOUNT
$172,477
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Sponsor Information
SPONSOR AWARD NUMBER
SPONSOR
SPONSOR TYPE
FUNCTION
Organized Research
PROGRAM NAME
Proposal Information
PROPOSAL NUMBER
15020218
PROPOSAL TYPE
New
ACTIVITY TYPE
Basic Research
PI Information
PI
Qian, Zhiyun
PI TITLE
Other
PI DEPTARTMENT
Computer Science & Engineering
PI COLLEGE/SCHOOL
Bourns College of Engineering
CO PIs
Project Information
ABSTRACT
The objective of this project is to strengthen the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a ubiquitous core Internet protocol, under emerging threat models to make it robust and secure enough to serve the needs of 'smart' technologies in communications, automobiles, medical devices, and other devices that touch our lives every day. It is terrifying to imagine that a smart car could fail to report an accident automatically due to a denial of service attack on its TCP connections, or a smart medical device could fail to report a patient's change in condition. This is not to mention the ever growing cyber attacks that leverage the global and powerful Internet. This project will systematically analyze the root causes of recent security vulnerabilities and generalize them. The results will offer valuable insights on how to avoid the problems. Further, the research is expected to lead to changes to the TCP implementations in major operating systems.
Specifically, the research is motivated by the following observations. First, more subtle problems such as side channels have been overlooked in TCP stacks. Second, new threat models have merged, e.g., co-located entities that do not trust each other. Third, the end-to-end assumption of TCP is broken due to the prevalence of network middleboxes, host-based firewalls, and censorship firewalls. The research will leverage model checking to systematically search for vulnerabilities under a variety of threat models and network settings. The models will be constructed from popular operating systems (with recent and representative versions) as well as network middleboxes. They can serve as the basis for testing and verifying future TCP stack implementations.(Abstract from NSF)
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