Allison Chen will present her General Exam "Understanding Visual Processing In Vision Language Models" on Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 1:30 PM in CS 302 and via zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/99275578452 Committee Members: Olga Russakovsky (advisor), Tom Griffiths, Szymon Rusinkiewicz Abstract: Applications in modern platforms are complex and thus hard to reason about their security. For instance, modern web applications have largely become cloud-based due to the flexibility and cost efficiency brought by the cloud. However, writing secure web applications is challenging as developers need to devise sufficient security measures to ensure intended policies are enforced while applications are cross-components and rapidly changing during development. To address this problem, we propose Faasten, which is a secure cloud architecture and implementation that enforces end-user data policies and supports general cloud applications with negligible performance overheads. Faasten uses decentralized information flow control (DIFC) and leverages Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) programming models to provide a safe, general, and self-encapsulating cloud interface for application developers. Additionally, another challenge that remains unsolved is timing channels. Faasten is unable to close timing channels in cloud platforms because such channels are a result of resource sharing which is out of control of Faasten. Timing channels are critical not only to cloud platforms but also in critical infrastructure. Existing defenses and mitigations are ad-hoc and often come with large performance penalties. With Leak Avoidant Resource Provisioners (LARPS), we argue that a large class of timing channels can be closed by carefully controlling information flow through resource provisioning decisions. In addition, we require a minimal set of hardware primitives to ensure LARP operations themselves do not impose additional timing channels. Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-sXQFoc8srt-hFcFyCmfxvFQlbJPCJA1vCuWKNsT... Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.