Enhancing System Security and Privacy with Program Analysis


Event Details
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Talk:
4:00 p.m., Avery 115

Reception:
3:30 p.m., Avery 348

Dr. Yinzhi Cao

Postdoctoral Scientist, Columbia University

Abstract

Cyber security and privacy have brought the attention from the general public these days. Melissa Hathaway, who advised both President Obama and President Bush, estimated in a report that governments and consumers lost $125 billion annually to cyber-attacks, including losses in tax revenue. In this talk, from the perspective of program analysis, I will discuss the security and privacy of two important computer systems: Web browser and Android system. In the first part, I will introduce how to prevent and detect drive-by download attacks, which penetrate the boundary of a browser principal. In particular, I will present JShield, a vulnerability-based detection engine that is more robust to obfuscated drive-by download attacks, when compared to various anti-virus software and most recent research papers. In the second part, I will introduce EdgeMiner, the first automatic tool that creates summaries of Android framework in the form of callback and registration pairs. With the summaries, existing static analysis system can correctly construct a control flow graph with hidden control flow dependencies introduced by callback methods. 

Speaker Bio

Yinzhi Cao is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in computer science at Northwestern University. Before that, he obtained his B.E. degree in electronics engineering at Tsinghua University in China. His research mainly focuses on the security and privacy of web, smart phones, and machine learning. He has published twelve papers at various security conferences, such as NDSS, ACSAC and DSN. His JShield system has been adopted by Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunication company. In the past, he served as a program committee member for IEEE CNS 2014, 2015 and web chair for AsiaCCS SESP’13. Previously, he also conducted research at SRI International and UC Santa Barbara as a summer intern.