Illinois Security Lab

The Illinois Security Lab is a research laboratory at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign established in 2004 to support research and education in computer and network security. The lab is part of the UIUC Computer Science Department and Information Trust Institute. Its research projects concern critical infrastructure protection, health care, messaging, networking, and privacy.

Projects

Secure Control Systems

Networked control systems such as the electric power grid use computers for tasks like protecting substations against overloads (protective relays) and metering facilities (advanced meters). The lab developed the "attested meter", a technology for security and privacy of advanced meters, and is working on security for building automation systems and substation automation.

Assisted Living Security

Advances in networking, distributed computing, and medical devices are combining with changes in the way health care is financed and the growing number of elderly people to produce strong prospects for the widespread use of assisted living, a health care approach which can benefit from transferring medical information collected in homes or dedicated facilities to clinicians over data networks. The lab explores security engineering of such systems through prototypes, field trials, and formal methods based on an architecture that uses a partially-trusted "Assisted Living Service Provider (ALSP)" as a third party intermediary between assisted persons and clinicians.

Adaptive Messaging Policy (AMPol)

Scalable distributed systems demand an ability to express and adapt to diverse policies of numerous distinct administrative domains. The lab introduced technologies for messaging systems with adaptive security policies based on "WSEmail", where Internet messaging is implemented as a web service, and "Attribute-Based Messaging (ABM)", where addressing is based on attributes of recipients.

Contessa Network Security

Although there has been significant progress on the formal analysis of security for integrity and confidentiality, there has been relatively less progress on treating denial-of-service attack. The lab is exploring techniques for doing this based on the "shared channel model", which envisions bandwidth as a limiting factor in attacks and focuses on host-based counter-measures such as "selective verification", which exploits adversary bandwidth limitations to favor valid parties. It is also developing new formal methods for reasoning about dynamic configuration of VPNs.

Formal Privacy

Many new information technologies have a profound impact on privacy. Threats from these have provoked legislation and calls for deeper regulation. The lab develops ways to treat privacy rules more formally, including better ways to reason using formal methods about conformance and the implications of regulations, and about how to quantify and classify privacy attitudes to control the risks of new technologies. Recent work showed how to formally encode HIPAA consent regulations using "privacy APIs" so they can be analyzed with model checking.

References

* Unified Architecture for Large-Scale Attested Metering, Michael LeMay, George Gross, Carl A. Gunter, and Sanjam Garg. IEEE Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (HICSS 07), Waikola, Hawaii, January 2007.
* Residential energy monitoring and computerized surveillance via utility power flows, G. Hart. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, pages 12–16, June 1989.
* Securing the Drop-Box Architecture for Assisted Living, Michael J. May, Wook Shin, Carl A. Gunter, and Insup Lee. ACM Formal Methods in Security Engineering (FMSE '06), Alexandria, VA, November 2006.
* I-Living: An Open System Architecture for Assisted Living, Qixin Wang, Wook Shin, Xue Liu, Zheng Zeng, Cham Oh, Bedoor K. Alshebli, Marco Caccamo, Carl A. Gunter, Elsa L. Gunter, Jennifer Hou, Karrie Karahalios, and Lui Sha. IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC '06), Taipei, Taiwan, October 2006.
* WSEmail: Secure Internet Messaging Based on Web Services, Kevin D. Lux, Michael J. May, Nayan L. Bhattad, and Carl A. Gunter. IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS '05), Orlando, Florida, July 2005.
* AMPol: Adaptive Messaging Policy, Raja Afandi, Jianqing Zhang, Munawar Hafiz and Carl A. Gunter. IEEE European Conference on web Services (ECOWS '06), Zurich, Switzerland, December 2006.
* Identity based ecncryption from the Weil pairing, D. Boneh and M. Franklin. SIAM J. of Comp., 32(3):586-615, 2003.
* Using Attribute-Based Access Control to Enable Attribute-Based Messaging, Rakesh Bobba, Omid Fatemieh, Fariba Khan, Carl A. Gunter, and Himanshu Khurana. IEEE Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '06) , Miami, FL, December 2006.
* Secure Role Based Messaging, David Chadwick, Graeme Lunt and Gansen Zhao Issrc. IFIP Conference on Communication and Multimedia (CMS '04), 2004.
* DoS Protection for Reliably Authenticated Broadcast, Carl A. Gunter, Sanjeev Khanna, Kaijun Tan, and Santosh Venkatesh. ICSOC Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS '04), San Diego, CA, February 2004.
* DDoS Defense by Offense, Michael Walfish, Mythili Vutukuru, Hari Balakrishnan, David Karger, and Scott Shenker. ACM SIGCOMM, Pisa, Italy, September 2006.
* Privacy APIs: Access Control Techniques to Analyze and Verify Legal Privacy Policies, Michael J. May, Carl A. Gunter, Insup Lee. IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW 06), Venice, Italy, July 2006.
* Verified Interoperable Implementations of Security Protocols, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Cedric Fournet, Andrew D. Gordon, Stephen Tse. IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW 06), Venice, Italy, July 2006.
* Privacy Sensitive Location Information Systems in Smart Buildings, Jodie P. Boyer, Kaijun Tan and Carl A. Gunter. Springer Security in Pervasive Computing (SPC '06), LNCS, pages 149-164, York, UK, April 2006.

External links

* [http://seclab.uiuc.edu Illinois Security Lab]
* [http://seclab.uiuc.edu/web/critical-infrastructure/attested-metering.html Attested Metering]
* [http://www.iti.uiuc.edu/tcip/index.html TCIP: Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid]
* [http://seclab.uiuc.edu/web/health-care/index.php Assisted Living Security]
* [http://lion.cs.uiuc.edu/assistedliving/ UIUC Assisted Living Project]
* [http://seclab.uiuc.edu/web/messaging/index.php Adaptive Messaging Policy]
* [http://sels.ncsa.uiuc.edu SELS Secure Email List Services]
* [http://seclab.uiuc.edu/web/networking/index.php Contessa Network Security]
* [http://seclab.uiuc.edu/web/privacy/index.php Formal Privacy]