“Plug and Pray” Today: Reflecting on a Decade of Peripheral Security Research

D-3284. New Engineering faculty Kevin Butler, Daniella Olivera, Patrick Traynor. These new faculty are cyber and computer security experts, and are part of UF's preemminance hires, UF Rising, and Top-Ten campaign.

Speaker: Prof. Kevin Butler
Affiliation: University of Florida

ECE297 Seminar Speaker Series

Abstract:  Computer peripherals are ubiquitous within organizations and enterprises, but their role in introducing malware and acting as vectors for data exfiltration has made their use problematic. Often, peripherals and hosts blindly trust each other. In this talk, we discuss solutions for defending against malicious peripheral devices by constraining their functionality at different layers of abstraction, and introduce a security framework for device protection. We also consider how new protocols meant to provide device authentication may fail in practice, and conclude by considering future challenges to assuring the security and trustworthiness of peripherals and the hosts they connect to.

Biography:  Kevin Butler is the Arnold and Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Associate Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research at the University of Florida. Kevin’s research focuses on the security of computer systems, including embedded and IoT systems, firmware analysis, trustworthy computing, mobile device security and privacy, data integrity and provenance, security of financial systems, cyber-physical systems, adversarial machine learning, and other topics relating to the trustworthiness of data.

Kevin received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2013 and was named International Educator of the Year within the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering in 2017 for his work on developing global standards for securing digital financial services in the developing world. He is co-chair of the International Telecommunication’s Security, Infrastructure, and Trust Working Group as part of the Financial Inclusion Global Initiative. Kevin was technical program co-chair of ACM WiSec 2018 and is conference chair for the 2020 and 2021 Annual Computer Security Applications Conferences. He received the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy’s Outstanding Community Service Award in 2017, and his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and many other media outlets. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM, and co-founder of CryptoDrop.

For more information, contact Prof. Ankur Mehta (mehtank@ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 15, 2019
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095