January 2021 - talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Ben Burgess will present his Pre FPO "Reverse Engineering Real World Trusted Systems" on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 4pm via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 25 Jan '21

25 Jan '21

Ben Burgess will present his Pre FPO " Reverse Engineering Real World Trusted Systems" on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 4pm via Zoom. Zoom Information: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/98643121461 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/98643121461 ] Meeting ID: 986 4312 1461 Examiners: Ed Felten (adviser), Arvind Narayanan, Nick Feamster (University of Chicago) Readers: Ed Felten (adviser), Prateek Mittal, Danny Huang (New York University) All are welcome to attend. Abstract: Overview In this talk, I will present two studies that focus on evaluating the security and privacy guarantees of real world systems that have the potential to affect large groups of people. The first study I will discuss evaluates the security of trunking radio systems which are used as the primary communication system for almost all public safety agencies. These radio systems provide higher availability guarantees than cellular phones or conventional two way radios while also promising completely private communications. In this talk, I will discuss the vulnerabilities these systems suffer either due to weak encryption ciphers or flawed protocol design which can allow an adversary to recover sensitive voice or data traffic. The second study I will present looks at the various exam proctoring software solutions that institutions are contracting to proctor their exams during COVID. I will provide a detailed analysis of the impact of these solutions on student privacy along with a look at the security guarantees they provide the institution. Police Radio For this part of the talk, I will focus on trunking radio systems designed by Motorola and Harris as they are the largest vendors in the public safety communication market. To protect voice communications, Motorola offers several different encryption options for the user to choose from including common ciphers such as DES and AES along with proprietary options such as their Advanced Digital Privacy (ADP) cipher. An earlier study by Glass et al. reverse engineered ADP and demonstrated that ADP is simply a wrapper around RC4 which has many known vulnerabilities. We demonstrate that the underlying voice traffic can be easily recovered from real world deployments using low cost digital TV receivers despite multipath interference challenges. We then demonstrate that both ADP and DES encrypted traffic can be recovered from these captures at a low cost using either desktop GPU hardware or rentable FPGA clusters. Finally, we look at the over the air rekey (OTAR) mechanism Motorola implements which allows the user to rekey certain voice channels when a radio is lost or stolen. We find serious issues with the OTAR protocol which allows a user to easily compromise this mechanism once they are able to decrypt voice traffic. By compromising the OTAR protocol, an adversary would be able to maintain persistent access to the encrypted communications on the system with no further work until all of the radios were recalled and manually rekeyed using a hardware loader. We extend this study to look at the other major offering in the public safety market, OpenSky by Harris. This offering has seen widespread adoption across the public safety market due to its perceived security despite lacking interoperability with the Motorola standard. We reverse engineer the protocol specification of the Harris solution to provide the first publicly available look at the underlying design. We demonstrate that traffic is not always encrypted as is widely believed by the agencies deploying the system. Additionally, we design an attack against this system which allows for an adversary to both intercept and forge traffic between the subscriber unit and base station. Exam Proctoring Software Study For this part of the talk, I will provide a detailed analysis of the impact of the major exam proctoring software offerings on student privacy along with a look at the security guarantees they provide. I will focus primarily on one of the most popular offerings, Examplify, which is being used to proctor the bar exam in many states. I will discuss several different exploits for it which allow the user to run the software in a virtual machine without detection, extract the exam contents without being logged, and extract the answers for the exam in certain cases. I will then discuss the details of the facial recognition models these solutions use to detect cheating and the potential racial biases of these models. Finally, I will discuss the impact on student privacy by looking at what the system service logs and shares with the developer.

1 0

Yufei Zheng will present her General Exam "Unbiased Round-trip Time Measurement with Limited Memory" on Friday, January 29, 2021 at 10am via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 22 Jan '21

22 Jan '21

Yufei Zheng will present her General Exam "Unbiased Round-trip Time Measurement with Limited Memory" on Friday, January 29, 2021 at 10am via Zoom. Zoom link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/3801894114 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/3801894114 ] The members of Yufei's committee are as follows: Jen Rexford (adviser), Mark Braverman, and Kyle Jamieson Link to Abstract and Reading List: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nmZ5aeiJJln5Zs7vh0K80hxJMyeLpUjwB4YoefC… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nmZ5aeiJJln5Zs7vh0K80hxJMyeLpUjwB4YoefC… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Zheng Shi will present her General Exam on Friday, January 29, 2021 at 4pm via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 22 Jan '21

22 Jan '21

Zheng Shi will present her General Exam on Friday, January 29, 2021 at 4pm via Zoom. Zoom link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/91086307682 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/91086307682 ] The members of her committee are as follows: Felix Heide (adviser), Olga Russakovsky, and Szymon Rusinkiewicz Link to Abstract and Reading List: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iXPZede3MBAa3MujyDShSnB_gFzdGr0f2yb4Vy3… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iXPZede3MBAa3MujyDShSnB_gFzdGr0f2yb4Vy3… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Susan Tan will present her General Exam "S^4: Strategic Sequential-Stage Speculation" on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 1:30pm via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 21 Jan '21

21 Jan '21

Susan Tan will present her General Exam "S^4: Strategic Sequential-Stage Speculation" on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 1:30pm via Zoom. Zoom link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95095727859 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95095727859 ] The members of her committee are as follows: David August (adviser), Amit Levy, and Aarti Gupta Link to Abstract and Reading List: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MCTiULHX39mie4C8bKIOZ6oTNxjzBc8bo0gkKd2… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MCTiULHX39mie4C8bKIOZ6oTNxjzBc8bo0gkKd2… ] [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MCTiULHX39mie4C8bKIOZ6oTNxjzBc8bo0gkKd2… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MCTiULHX39mie4C8bKIOZ6oTNxjzBc8bo0gkKd2… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Kyle Genova will present his Pre-FPO on Thursday, January 14, 2021 at 10am via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

Kyle Genova will present his Pre-FPO on Thursday, January 14, 2021 at 10am via Zoom. Zoom link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95990892901 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95990892901 ] Meeting ID: 959 9089 2901 The members of his committee are as follows: Tom Funkhouser (advisor), Olga Russakovsky (reader), Forrester Cole (reader, Google), Adam Finkelstein (examiner), Szymon Rusinkiewicz (examiner). All are welcome to attend. Abstract: Often, computer vision tasks require understanding or generating data that is explicitly three dimensional. Such tasks can be relatively low level, like recovering geometric surface properties for object insertion or relighting, or high level, like semantic segmentation of point clouds for mapping or navigation. Yet, the most common form of input data or data label is an image. RGB and depth cameras are ubiquitous sensors, and it is often also easier to collect labels at scale in 2D compared to 3D. Based on this observation, we propose methods for recovering 3D shapes from input 2D views, and understanding 3D data from 2D supervision. First, we demonstrate a method for recovering the geometry of human faces where both the input data and labels are 2D RGB images. This is possible only because face geometry can be represented with a domain-specific parametric 3D morphable model, which can be separately learned from 3D data. We then consider more general classes of shape, for which we propose a novel representation, the Structured Implicit Function. We show that this representation is useful for learning general shape priors and correspondences, and demonstrate it can be used for RGB image -> 3D shape recovery. We extend this representation with local deep implicit functions, and demonstrate its utility for completing 2D depth observations of shapes in a more robust way than existing approaches. In addition to methods for recovering 3D geometry from views, we propose methods for understanding geometry from views and for understanding how geometry is typically viewed. The first method enables training a 3D semantic segmentation network from only a labeled image collection, in comparison to previous methods that require labeled 3D training data. We then propose a method to synthesize views that mimic a diverse input image collection, by modeling the collection as samples from a view distribution that can be repeatedly sampled via rendering synthetic geometry. Our methods demonstrate that leveraging and understanding the relationship between input views and geometry is useful for a spectrum of explicitly 3D tasks.

1 0

Angelina Wang will present her General Exam "Investigating Biases along the Machine Learning Pipeline" on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 10am via zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

Angelina Wang will present her General Exam "Investigating Biases along the Machine Learning Pipeline" on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 10am via zoom. Link to Zoom: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/3862333433 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/3862333433 ] The members of her committee are as follows: Olga Russakovsky (adviser), Arvind Narayanan, and Brandon Stewart Link to abstract and reading list: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uf9cyFuNwdF54FQrQGx2S2t68zFcvMdTM3UYGM3… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uf9cyFuNwdF54FQrQGx2S2t68zFcvMdTM3UYGM3… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Marcelo Orenes Vera will present his General Exam "OpenLT: Democratizing Latency Tolerance for SoC Designs" on Monday, January 18, 2021 at 10am via zoom
by Nicki Mahler 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

Marcelo Orenes Vera will present his General Exam "OpenLT: Democratizing Latency Tolerance for SoC Designs" on Monday, January 18, 2021 at 10am via zoom. Zoom Link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/8650240145 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/8650240145 ] The members of his committee are as follows: Margaret Martonosi (adviser), David Wentzlaff (adviser, ELE), and Aarti Gupta Link to abstract and reading list: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vn0ZFujor8wpddvjs8hZkTQ-hjs8o0U7Xnluk6n… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vn0ZFujor8wpddvjs8hZkTQ-hjs8o0U7Xnluk6n… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Shunyu Yao will present his General Exam "Action Reasoning and Semantic Evaluation in Text-based Games" on Monday, January 18, 2021 at 3pm via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

Shunyu Yao will present his General Exam "Action Reasoning and Semantic Evaluation in Text-based Games" on Monday, January 18, 2021 at 3pm via Zoom. Zoom link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/my/shunyuy | https://princeton.zoom.us/my/shunyuy ] The members of his committee are as follows: Karthik Narasimhan (adviser), Danqi Chen, and Tom Griffiths Link to abstract and reading list: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lf1w8OAWqdAdeLC6AnDJ39nVtaY1aobYtvrt-tX… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lf1w8OAWqdAdeLC6AnDJ39nVtaY1aobYtvrt-tX… ] [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-WwuoIeqv4fNRls8lmUzUA90OEO_9fYgE1R2Fz0… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-WwuoIeqv4fNRls8lmUzUA90OEO_9fYgE1R2Fz0… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Ruairidh Battleday will present his General Exam "Analogy-Based Nonparametric Inference for Relational Generalization" on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 1pm via Zoom.
by Nicki Mahler 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

Ruairidh Battleday will present his General Exam " Analogy-Based Nonparametric Inference for Relational Generalization" on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 1pm via Zoom. Link to Zoom: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/99321721838 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/99321721838 ] The members of his committee are as follows: Tom Griffiths (adviser), Ryan Adams, and Barbara Engelhardt Link to abstract and reading list: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VGqhvbhSFu7IVDqvimMxdHZDfsvXCA5RthjKILX… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VGqhvbhSFu7IVDqvimMxdHZDfsvXCA5RthjKILX… ] [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/15BShPFjGkmx_q5drMK1HUgjE2UxdAHsaw8ZCHKY… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/15BShPFjGkmx_q5drMK1HUgjE2UxdAHsaw8ZCHKY… ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.

1 0

Themis Melissaris will present his Pre FPO "Towards Testing and Analyzing Correctness in Concurrent Systems: From Microprocessors to IoT and Distributed Systems" on Monday, January 18, 2021 via Zoom
by Nicki Mahler 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

Themis Melissaris will present his Pre FPO "Towards Testing and Analyzing Correctness in Concurrent Systems: From Microprocessors to IoT and Distributed Systems" on Monday, January 18, 2021 via Zoom Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/92110015157 Committee: Margaret Martonosi: advisor Kelly Shaw: co-advisor, reader, Williams College Kyle Jamieson: reader David August: non-reader Wyatt Lloyd: non-reader Abstract follows below. All are invited to attend. Abstract: The explosive data growth and the slowdown of Moore’s law presents new challenges for the next generation of hardware and software. To extract performance, systems ranging from microprocessors to internet of things (IoT) devices and distributed systems, increasingly leverage parallelism and concurrency. However, the performance benefits come at the cost of increased complexity in designing, specifying and testing correctness of these systems. This dissertation draws insights across the different domains of computer architecture, IoT and distributed systems, resulting in a set of practical tools and methodologies that allow for rigorous and efficient testing of correctness on multiprocessors, IoT systems and distributed systems. More specifically, this thesis introduces PerpLE, a tool that enables synchronization-free consistency testing for multiprocessors and relies on property based testing using Litmus tests. This dissertation demonstrates PerpLE’s ability to speed up testing performance by orders of magnitude against the existing state of the art, enabling fast error discovery in commercial microprocessors. In addition, this thesis presents a study for rigorous concurrency testing of commercial and opensource IoT systems. The study demonstrates correctness deficiencies of IoT systems and identifies the implications of race conditions, lack of atomicity and weak consistency on applications. To mitigate erroneous behavior for IoT applications, the Okapi tool is introduced. Finally, this dissertation presents Musli Tool, a practical tool for empirical consistency testing of distributed systems that leverages techniques and methodologies based on the computer architecture concept of Litmus tests. Musli Tool provides automated testing by generating property-based tests and allows for increased testing performance and fast portability in open source distributed systems.

1 1