News

July 8, 2008:

The paper "Composition Attacks and Auxiliary Information in Data Privacy" writen by Srivatsava Ranjit Ganta, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan and Adam Smith has been accepted at the 14th Annual ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2008).

June 13, 2008:

The paper "Systemic Issues in the Hart InterCivic and Premier Voting Systems: Reflections Following Project EVEREST" written by Kevin Butler, William Enck, Harri Hursti, Stephen McLaughlin, Patrick Traynor and Patrick McDaniel has been accepted at the USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology (EVT) Workshop.

May 28, 2008:

The paper "Effective Blame for Information-Flow Violations" written by Dave King, Trent Jaeger, Somesh Jha, and Sanjit A. Seshia has been accepted at the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering.

April 21, 2008:

Penn State is among the first universities to be designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research (CAE-R) by NSA/DHS for academic years 2008-2013. Congratulations to the SIIS lab members and others throughout the department and university who have helped us obtain this designation through excellence in IA research.

April 8, 2008:

The paper "Verifying Compliance of Trusted Programs" written by Sandra Rueda, Dave King and Trent Jaeger has been accepted at the 17th USENIX Security Symposium.

March 8, 2008:

The paper "Measuring Integrity on Mobile Phone Systems" written by Divya Muthukumaran, Anuj Sawani, Joshua Schiffman, Brian M. Jung and Trent Jaeger has been accepted at the 13th ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT).

February 27, 2008:

Patrick Traynor passed his doctoral defense. Congratulations to Dr. Traynor for his great work! We wish him good luck in his search for a job in academia.

February 19, 2008:

Patrick McDaniel is presenting the first of five talks in three days on the EVEREST voting study at universities in Ohio. More information, dates, and locations can be found here.

January 18, 2008:

Congratuations to Patrick Traynor, William Enck, Patrick McDaniel, and Tom La Porta as their paper, "Mitigating Attacks on Open Functionality in SMS-Capable Cellular Networks", was accepted for publication in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Journal.

December 14, 2007:

The Ohio Secretary of State has released the EVEREST election system report from the academic team, of which the SIIS lab was a participant. The report can be retrieved here.

November 5, 2007:

Congratulations to Patrick Traynor, Kevin Butler, William Enck, and Patrick McDaniel, whose paper, Realizing Massive-Scale Conditional Access Systems Through Attribute-Based Cryptosystems was accepted at the 15th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS'08).

September 14, 2007:

Professor Patrick McDaniel has been selected to serve as the next Editor in Chief of the Association of Computing Machinery Transactions on Internet Technology (ACM TOIT) Journal. Established in the summer of 2001, TOIT is the premiere academic journal in the fields of Internet and Web technologies, and brings together many computing disciplines including computer software engineering, computer programming languages, middleware, database management, security, knowledge discovery and data mining, networking and distributed systems, communications, performance and scalability etc. Patrick will begin his three-year term as EIC immediately.

August 3, 2007:

Boniface Hicks passed his doctoral defense and deserves congratulations for his great achievement and the honor of being the first Ph.D. graduate from the SIIS lab. He will be continuing onto Saint Vincent College in late August. We wish him the best of luck!

April 5,2007:

Congratulations to Patrick Traynor, Patrick McDaniel, and Thomas La Porta whose paper On Attack Causality in Internet-Connected Cellular Networks was accepted at the 16th USENIX Security Symposium to be held in August 2007.

March 10, 2007:

Congratulations to William Enck, Patrick McDaniel, and co-authors, whose paper Configuration Management at Massive Scale: System Design and Experience was accepted at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference to be held in June 2007.

Congratulations as well to Boniface Hicks, Sandra Rueda, Trent Jaeger, and Patrick McDaniel whose paper From Trusted to Secure: Building and Executing Applications that Enforce System Security was also accepted at USENIX Annual 2007.

February 28, 2007:

Congratulations to Patrick McDaniel who has been promoted to Senior Member of the IEEE.

January 5, 2007:

Dr. Patrick McDaniel was named associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

January 3, 2007:

Congratulations to Dr. Patrick McDaniel and Dr. Sencun Zhu on receiving prestigious NSF CAREER Awards.

The National Science Foundation established the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program in 1994 in recognition of the critical roles played by faculty members in integrating research and education, and in fostering the natural connections between the processes of learning and discovery. The CAREER program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members, and which embodies NSF's commitment to encourage faculty to practice, and academic institutions to value, integration of research and education. The intent of the program is to provide stable support at a sufficient level and duration to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars in the context of the mission of their organization.

December 21, 2006:

The Networking and Security Research Center has recently added Boeing as an associate member company and has been named a Ben Franklin Center of Excellence. These new associations will be extremely beneficial for both the SIIS lab and the Center.

December 17, 2006:

Congratulations to Patrick Traynor, who has been awarded the 2007 Pennsylvania State University Alumni Association Dissertation Award. This award is considered to be among the most prestigious available to Penn State graduate students and recognizes outstanding achievement in scholarship and professional accomplishment.

November 16, 2006:

Congratulations go out to Boniface Hicks and Patrick McDaniel, whose paper Understanding Practical Application Development in Security-typed Languages has won the award for "Best Student Paper" at this year's Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)!

November 2, 2006:

The Penn State College of Engineering has selected Patrick Traynor as one of three nominees for the very prestigious Alumni Association Dissertation Award. The winner of the award will be announced in January. Congratulations Patrick!

August 2006:

Dr. Patrick McDaniel has been selected to be a co-chair of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The symposium will be held in Oakland, CA on May 20-23, 2007.

August 29, 2006:

Congratulations to Dr. Trent Jaeger and Dr. Patrick McDaniel on the recent award of a NSF Computing & Communications Technology grant. This award will support future research in exploiting asymmetry in performance and security requirements for I/O in high-end computing.

August 29, 2006:

Dr. Trent Jaeger and Dr. Patrick McDaniel were recently awarded a Cyber Trust Program grant from the NSF for their work on Shamon: Systems Approaches for Constructing Distributed Trust.

The Shamon (shared reference monitor) system enables the composition of integrity-verified reference monitors on multiple, physical machines into single, coherent unit bound by enforcement function and mandatory access control policy, resulting in consistent security guarantees over distributed applications. These policies are defined over collections of virtual machines, called coalition, which comprise distributed applications.

Congratulations!

July 31, 2006:

Congratulations to Kevin Butler, Patrick Traynor, William Enck, Jennifer Plasterr, and Patrick McDaniel, whose paper Privacy Preserving Web-Based Email was accepted at the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2006).

July 21, 2006:

Congratulations to Kevin Butler and Patrick McDaniel, in collaboration with William Aiello (UBC), whose paper Optimizing BGP Security by Exploiting Path Stability was accepted at the 13th annual ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'06).

Congratulations as well to Matthew Pirretti, Patrick Traynor, and Patrick McDaniel, in collaboration with Brent Waters (SRI), whose paper Secure Attribute-Based Systems was also accepted at CCS'06.

June 27th, 2006

Congratulations to Patrick Traynor, William Enck, Patrick McDaniel, and Tom La Porta, whose paper Mitigating Attacks on Open Functionality in SMS-Capable Cellular Networks was accepted to the Twelfth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom).

June 26th, 2006

Congratulations to Trent Jaeger, David King, Kevin Butler, et al., whose paper Leveraging IPsec for Distributed Authorization was accepted to the 2nd IEEE Communications Society/CreateNet International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm'06).

Also accepted to this conference was the paper of Patrick Traynor, Michael Chien, Scott Weaver, Boniface Hicks, and Patrick McDaniel, Non-Invasive Methods for Host Certification.

April 21st, 2006

Congratulations to Kevin Butler, who won the very selective University Graduate Fellowship.

April 21st , 2006

Congratulations to Luke St.Clair, who was awarded the National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Fellowship.

April 3rd , 2006

Congratulations to Dr. Sencun Zhu and Xinran Wang, whose paper "SIGFree: A Signature-free Buffer Overflow Attack Blocker" was accepted at the 2006 Usenix Security Symposium. The paper will be presented in Vancouver in August.

March 30th, 2006

Congratulations to Ph.D students William Enck and Luke St.Clair, who were each awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.

January 27th, 2006

Congratulations to Dr. Trent Jaeger, whose paper Retrofitting Legacy Code for Authorization Policy Enforcement has been accepted to the IEEE's Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland '06). The paper will be presented at the conference in late May.

November 6th, 2005

Congratulations to Drs. Trent Jaeger and Patrick McDaniel, who have each had publications accepted for the Internet Society's Network and Distributed System Security Conference (NDSS'06). The papers, Toward Automated Information-Flow Integrity Verification for Security-Critical Applications and Enterprise Security: A Community of Interest Based Approach will be presented at the conference in early February, 2006.

October 5, 2005

The recent work of SIIS Lab students William Enck, Patrick Traynor, SIIS Lab Director Patrick McDaniel, and NSRC Director Thomas La Porta on the vulnerabilities discovered in the cellular phone networks is available at http://smsanalysis.org. A copy of the paper, which has been accepted at the 2005 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), is also available. Finally, you can find the New York Times article here.