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Talk: James H. Graham, Wednesday, June 22- 10am
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 21 Jun '16

21 Jun '16

Room: 402 Date: Wednesday, June 22 Time: 10am Host: Andrew Appel Trusted Software for Cybersecurity in Industrial Control Systems James H. Graham University of Louisville, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engr. and True Secure SCADA, LLC This talk will discuss the use of seL4 and trusted software components in industrial control systems. The goal is to protect critical infrastructure installations against devastating cyber-attacks on the control systems which monitor, regulate and control these facilities (think for a moment about being without electrical power and water for a really long time!) This talk will include an overview of three successful attacks against supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and a discussion of some approaches to mitigating these threats and their potential consequences through the use of trusted software components. Dr. James Graham’s research on ICS cybersecurity has been funded for ten years by the Dept. of Justice and the Dept. of Homeland Security and other national and state agencies. He worked as a product and process engineer for General Motors, and served as an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at the University of Louisville for 34 years prior to retirement in 2014. He is co-founder and CEO of True Secure SCADA, LLC. _______________________________________________ talks mailing list talks(a)lists.cs.princeton.edu To edit subscription settings or remove yourself, use this link: https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/talks

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Talk: James H. Graham, Wednesday, June 22- 10am
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 16 Jun '16

16 Jun '16

Room: TBD Date: Wednesday, June 22 Time: 10am Host: Andrew Appel Trusted Software for Cybersecurity in Industrial Control Systems James H. Graham University of Louisville, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engr. and True Secure SCADA, LLC This talk will discuss the use of seL4 and trusted software components in industrial control systems. The goal is to protect critical infrastructure installations against devastating cyber-attacks on the control systems which monitor, regulate and control these facilities (think for a moment about being without electrical power and water for a really long time!) This talk will include an overview of three successful attacks against supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and a discussion of some approaches to mitigating these threats and their potential consequences through the use of trusted software components. Dr. James Graham’s research on ICS cybersecurity has been funded for ten years by the Dept. of Justice and the Dept. of Homeland Security and other national and state agencies. He worked as a product and process engineer for General Motors, and served as an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at the University of Louisville for 34 years prior to retirement in 2014. He is co-founder and CEO of True Secure SCADA, LLC.

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Ankit Garg will present his FPO on Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 11am in CS 302
by Nicki Gotsis 08 Jun '16

08 Jun '16

Ankit Garg will present his FPO, "INFORMATION THEORETIC RELAXATIONS IN COMPLEXITY THEORY" on Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 11am in CS 302. The members of his committee are Mark Braverman (adviser), Readers: Zeev Dvir and Ran Raz (Weizmann Institute of Science); Nonreaders: Avi Wigderson (Math) and Bernard Chazelle. A copy of his thesis is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The abstract follow below. Since Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” [Sha48], information theory has found applicability in a wide range of scientific disciplines. Over the past two decades, information theory has reemerged in theoretical computer science as a mathematical tool with applications to streaming algorithms, data structures, communication complexity etc. Properties of mutual information such as additivity and chain rule play an important role in these applications. In this thesis, we apply information theoretic tools to study various problems in complexity theory. These include the study of information complexity and communication complexity [BGPW13a, BGPW13c, BG14], hardness amplification of 2-prover games [BG15], applications of quantum information complexity to the study of quantum communication complexity of disjointness [BGK+15] and the use of strong data processing inequalities to analyze communication complexity of distributed statistical estimation [GMN14, BGM+16]. Along the way, we also develop several information theoretic tools such as correlated sampling theorems, subadditivity properties of information and quantum information cost etc. which could be of independent interest.

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1-2pm Tue June 7 talk on network optimization in CS 302
by Jennifer Rexford 07 Jun '16

07 Jun '16

Speaker: Sanjay Rao, Purdue University Title: Robust Guarantees for Networks with Flexible Routing Date/time: 1-2pm Tuesday June 7 Location: CS 302 Abstract: A key challenge confronting network designers is verifying that their networks can properly cope with a wide range of traffic conditions and failure scenarios. Since many design choices (e.g., topology design, middlebox placement) are made over longer time-scales and cannot be easily adapted, it is important to ensure that a given design choice can perform well across traffic demands and failures. In this paper, we develop an optimization-theoretic framework to provide guaranteed bounds on link utilization across traffic patterns and failure scenarios of interest, while considering flexible routing strategies optimized for the specific scenario. Considering flexible routing strategies is important since oblivious strategies can be unduly conservative, but poses theoretical challenges that we address. We apply our framework to multiple case studies including design of MPLS tunnels, and routing in the presence of middleboxes. Evaluations over real network topologies and traffic data show the promise of the approach.

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Klaus-Tycho Förster today at 11am
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 01 Jun '16

01 Jun '16

Moving Network Flows without Congestion: Different Models, Different Complexities Wednesday June 1, 2016, 11am Computer Science 302 While the optimal utilization of networks with (multi-commodity) flows is a well-studied research area, the consistent migration of flows is still a relatively young field: If the demands in a network change, how can we satisfy these new demands without losing packets or rate-limiting flows in the process? Central control, as offered by Software Defined Networking, cannot change the network behavior instantaneously. E.g., due to asynchrony, links can be over-utilized in the migration, leading to (temporary) congestion. In this talk, we are going to look at consistent flow migration for different models, ranging from single-destination flows with weak consistency requirements and arbitrary flow paths, to multi-commodity flows along fixed new paths with truly lossless migration. (Joint ongoing work with Sebastian Brandt, Laurent Vanbever, and Roger Wattenhofer) Klaus-Tycho Foerster is a PhD candidate in the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory at ETH Zurich, advised by Roger Wattenhofer. Prior to joining ETH as a research assistant, he earned his master degrees in mathematics and computer science, both at the Braunschweig University of Technology. Klaus' research focus lies in distributed computing, graph algorithms, and Software Defined Networking: Funded by Microsoft Research, he is studying the complexity of consistent updates in SDNs.

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Fwd: EE Seminar-Wednesday, May 25, 2016, 3:30pm, E-Quad B205, Arya Mazumdar, Locally Repairable Codes
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 23 May '16

23 May '16

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR SERIES Speaker: Dr. Arya Mazumdar University of Massachusetts at Amherst Title: Locally Repairable Codes Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2016 Time: 3:30pm Room: E-Quad, B205 Host: Prof. Emmanuel Abbe Abstract: Due to applications in large-scale distributed storage systems, local repair properties of codes have recently earned a lot of attention. In the first part of the talk, we show that generalized locality properties of codes lead to the notion of a graph capacity that is fundamental in the study of network flow problems. This amazingly reveal a new connection between locally repairable codes (LRC) and broadcasting with side information (index coding). We further elaborate on the central challenge in this area: deriving fundamental limits on locally repairable codes over small alphabet, and construction of maximally recoverable codes. We present our very recent result on optimum rate of LRC that outperform all previous results.

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Katherine Edwards will present her FPO, "On edge colouring, fractionally colouring and partitioning graphs" on Tuesday, 5/31/2016 at 11am in CS 402
by Nicki Gotsis 18 May '16

18 May '16

Katherine Edwards will present her FPO "On edge colouring, fractionally colouring and partitioning graphs" on Tuesday, 5/31/2016 at 11am, 402 Computer Science Building. The members of her committee are Paul Seymour (adviser), Readers: Maria Chudnovsky (Math) and Chun-Hung Liu (Math); Nonreaders: Robert Tarjan and Bernard Chazelle. A copy of her thesis is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend her talk. The abstract follow below. Abstract: We present an assortment of results in graph theory. First, Tutte conjectured that every two-edge connected cubic graph with no Petersen graph minor is three-edge-colourable. This generalizes the four-colour theorem. Robertson et al. had previously shown that to prove Tutte’s conjecture, it was enough to prove it for doublecross graphs. We provide a proof of the double cross case. Seymour conjectured the following generalization of the four-colour theorem. Every d-regular planar graph can be d-edge-coloured, provided that for every odd-cardinality set X of vertices, there are at least d edges with exactly one end in X. Seymour’s conjecture was previously known to be true for values of d  7. We provide a proof for the case d = 8. We then discuss upper bounds for the fractional chromatic number of graphs not containing large cliques. It has been conjectured that each graph with maximum degree at most ! and no complete subgraph of size ! has fractional chromatic number bounded below ! by at least a constant f(!). We provide the currently best known bounds for f(!), for 4  !  103. We also give a general upper bound for the fractional chromatic number in terms of the sizes of cliques and maximum degrees in local areas of a graph. Next, we give a result that says, roughly, that a graph with su"ciently large treewidth contains many disjoint subgraphs with ‘good’ linkedness properties. A similar result was a key tool in a recent proof of a polynomial bound in the excluded grid theorem. Our theorem is a quantitative improvement with a new proof. Finally, we discuss the p-centre problem, a central NP-hard problem in graph clustering. Here we are given a graph and an integer p, and need to identify a set of p vertices, called centres, so that the maximum distance from a vertex to its closest centre (the p-radius) is minimized. We give a quasilinear time approximation algorithm to solve p-centres when the hyperbolicity of the graph is fixed, with a small additive error on the p-radius.

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Talk: June Andronick today, 10:30am
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 16 May '16

16 May '16

Talk: Interrupts in OS code: let’s reason about them. Yes, this means concurrency. June Andronick, Data61 Monday, May 16th, 10:30am Computer Science 402 Existing modelled and verified operating systems (OS’s) typically run on uniprocessor platforms and run with interrupts mostly disabled. This makes formal reasoning more tractable: execution is mostly sequential. The eChronos OS is a real-time OS used in tightly constrained devices, running on (uniprocessor) embedded micro-controllers. It is used in the DARPA-funded HACMS program, where it runs the flight control software of a high-assurance quadcopter. To provide low latency, the eChronos OS runs with interrupts enabled and provides a preemptive scheduler. In terms of verification, this means that concurrency reasoning is required, which significantly increases the complexity: application and OS instructions may be interleaved with interrupt handler instructions. In our work we explicitly model the effect of interrupts and their handling by the hardware and OS. We provide a general formal model of the interleaving between OS code, application code and interrupt handlers. We then instantiate this model to formalise the scheduling behavior of the eChronos OS, and prove the main scheduler property: the running task is always the highest-priority runnable task. June Andronick is a Senior Researcher at Data61|CSIRO (formerly NICTA). Her research focuses on increasing the reliability of critical software systems, by mathematically proving that the code behaves as expected and satisfies security and safety requirements. She contributed to the seL4 correctness proof and now focuses on concurrency reasoning for OS code. She leads the concurrency software verification research in Data61, and is deputy leader of the Trustworthy Systems group. She was recognised in 2011 by MIT's Technology Review as one of the world's top young innovators (TR35). She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paris-Sud, France.

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Talk: June Andronick Monday May 16, 10:30am- reminder
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 15 May '16

15 May '16

Talk: Interrupts in OS code: let’s reason about them. Yes, this means concurrency. June Andronick, Data61 Monday, May 16th, 10:30am Computer Science 402 Existing modelled and verified operating systems (OS’s) typically run on uniprocessor platforms and run with interrupts mostly disabled. This makes formal reasoning more tractable: execution is mostly sequential. The eChronos OS is a real-time OS used in tightly constrained devices, running on (uniprocessor) embedded micro-controllers. It is used in the DARPA-funded HACMS program, where it runs the flight control software of a high-assurance quadcopter. To provide low latency, the eChronos OS runs with interrupts enabled and provides a preemptive scheduler. In terms of verification, this means that concurrency reasoning is required, which significantly increases the complexity: application and OS instructions may be interleaved with interrupt handler instructions. In our work we explicitly model the effect of interrupts and their handling by the hardware and OS. We provide a general formal model of the interleaving between OS code, application code and interrupt handlers. We then instantiate this model to formalise the scheduling behavior of the eChronos OS, and prove the main scheduler property: the running task is always the highest-priority runnable task. June Andronick is a Senior Researcher at Data61|CSIRO (formerly NICTA). Her research focuses on increasing the reliability of critical software systems, by mathematically proving that the code behaves as expected and satisfies security and safety requirements. She contributed to the seL4 correctness proof and now focuses on concurrency reasoning for OS code. She leads the concurrency software verification research in Data61, and is deputy leader of the Trustworthy Systems group. She was recognised in 2011 by MIT's Technology Review as one of the world's top young innovators (TR35). She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Paris-Sud, France.

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CORRECTION: Laura Roberts will present her general exam on Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 2pm in CS 402.
by Nicki Gotsis 12 May '16

12 May '16

CORRECTION: The members of Laura Roberts committee are Nick Feamster (adviser), Jennifer Rexford, and Arvind Narayanan. ________________________ > On May 12, 2016, at 9:06 AM, Nicki Gotsis <ngotsis(a)CS.Princeton.EDU> wrote: > > Laura Roberts will present her general exam on Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 2pm in CS 402. > > The members of her committee are Jennifer Rexford (adviser), Nick Feamster, and Arvind Narayanan. > > Everyone is invited to attend her talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Her abstract and reading list follow below. > > Abstract: > Tor is a very popular anonymity network that is known to be susceptible to end-to-end traffic correlation attacks that can be performed by network-level adversaries such as ASes and IXPs. Previous work on such attacks has focused on the TCP streams while the accompanying DNS traffic has been completely ignored. In our work we study the nature of DNS resolution in Tor and how DNS traffic can be used by network-level adversaries to deanonymize Tor traffic. For example, we are investigating how DNS traffic can be used to boost the success of website fingerprinting attacks. Our contributions include drawing attention to the role DNS can play in Tor deanonymization attacks and improving upon earlier Tor measurement techniques in order to produce results and estimates that are more practical and realistic. > > Reading List: > - Computer Networks (5th edition) by Tanenbaum and Wetherall, Chs. 1, 5-8 > - Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Anderson, Chs. 1-8, 21-24 > - “Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router” by Dingledine et al. > - “Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries” by Johnson et al. > - “Location Diversity in Anonymity Networks” by Feamster and Dingledine > - “Website Fingerprinting at Internet Scale” by Panchenko et al. > - “A Critical Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks” by Juarez et al. > - “Passive Attack Analysis for Connection-Based Anonymity Systems” by Serjantov and Sewell > - “Defending Tor from Network Adversaries: A Case Study of Network Path Prediction” by Juen et al. > - “AS-awareness in Tor Path Selection” by Edman and Syverson > - “DNS measurements at a root server” by Brownlee et al. > - “Sampled Traffic Analysis by Internet-Exchange-Level Adversaries” by Murdoch and Zieliński > _______________________________________________ > talks mailing list > talks(a)lists.cs.princeton.edu > To edit subscription settings or remove yourself, use this link: > https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/talks

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