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SUMMARY:IC Talk: Cyber Attacks and Defenses: Trends\, Challenges\, and Out
 look
DTSTART:20220228T160000
DTEND:20220228T170000
DTSTAMP:20260510T022802Z
UID:a36f0ff1fcf8dd00867fa4759efb75a4beea238b31479c62b39f7ea9
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Michael Franz - University of California\, Irvine\n\nAbstr
 act\nA cyber attacker needs to find only one way in\, while defenders need
  to guard a lot of ground. Adversaries can fully debug and perfect their a
 ttacks on their own computers\, exactly replicating the environment that 
 they will later be targeting. This is the situation today\, which has been
  exacerbated by an increasing trend towards a software "monoculture" (in 
 which there are only two major desktop operating systems and two major pho
 ne operating systems\, one major office software suite\, and so on).\n\nOn
 e possible defense is software diversity\, which raises the bar to attacke
 rs. A lot of academic and industrial research has been investigating such 
 software diversity\, from simple ASLR (address space layout randomization
 ) to more complex whole-program randomization. In the latter\, a diversifi
 cation engine automatically generates a large number of different version
 s of the same program\, potentially one unique version for every computer.
  These all behave in exactly the same way from the perspective of the end-
 user\, but they implement their functionality in subtly different ways. As
  a result\, a specific attack will succeed on only a small fraction of tar
 gets and a large number of different attack vectors would be needed to ta
 ke over a significant percentage of them. Because an attacker has no way o
 f knowing a priori which specific attack will succeed on which specific t
 arget\, this method also very significantly increases the cost of attacks 
 directed at specific targets.\n\nUnfortunately\, attackers have now starte
 d assembling their attacks on the target itself\, circumventing diversity.
  Hence\, in the arms race between attackers and defenders\, we are alread
 y at the point where yet another set of defenses is needed\, before the pr
 evious one is even fully deployed across the software industry. \n\nMy ta
 lk will present a time-line of attacks and defenses\, clearly illustrating
  a "cat and mouse game" in which defenses are almost always reactive to at
 tacks that have already happened. I will discuss my vision of how to get 
 ahead of the attackers\, and close by stating why\, in spite of the bleak 
 situation today\, I am confident that we will eventually be able to stop 
 most kinds of low-level cyber attacks completely.\n\nBio\nMichael Franz is
  a Chancellor's Professor at the University of California\, Irvine (UCI) a
 nd the director of its Secure Systems and Software Laboratory. He is a Pro
 fessor of Computer Science in UCI's Donald Bren School of Information and
  Computer Sciences and a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer 
 Science (by courtesy) in UCI's Henry Samueli School of Engineering. He is
  a Fellow of the AAAS\, ACM\, IEEE\, and IFIP\, a recipient of ACM's Charl
 es P. Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award\, the IEEE Computer Society
 's Technical Achievement Award\, and a Humboldt Research Award.\n\nProf. F
 ranz was an early pioneer in the areas of mobile code and dynamic compilat
 ion. He created an early just-in-time compilation system\, contributed to 
 the theory and practice of continuous compilation and optimization\, and 
 co-invented the trace compilation technology that eventually became the Ja
 vaScript engine in Mozilla’s Firefox browser. He has graduated 35 Ph.D.
  students as their primary advisor. Franz received a Dr. sc. techn. degree
  in Computer Science and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH degree\, both from t
 he Swiss Federal Institute of Technology\, ETH Zurich.\n\nMore information
 \n 
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420 https://epfl.zoom.us/
 j/66255076688?pwd=SXlMd1EvdHRlQnZqTCtoZkExZWlBZz09
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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