Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012 - (Page 13)

“Every day, hundreds of thousands of hackers try to attack America’s cyberinfrastructure.”
— Yu Chen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering

is on keeping it safe in a multi-core environment rather than in a mobile device. They’re interested in preventing so-called “side-channel” attacks, in which a hacker gains access to information that’s unintentionally revealed in a space shared by two chips. For example, one chip can’t “see” what another has put in the small storage area known as the cache, but it can detect what line of code in the cache was accessed. From there, it’s possible to reconstruct an encryption key. Hackers have figured out how to capitalize on these small scraps of information that leak out while a processor is performing other functions. The attacker doesn’t even have to have any privileges on the machine to do it. Some experts have even demonstrated a way to get the encryption key just from the sound of a printer. “Side channels are everywhere,” Abu-Ghazaleh says. “What we want to do is like putting a silencer on the printer.” Their technique, called non-monopolizable cache, prevents the attacker from taking over the cache. “We reserve small portions of the cache to be private to each processor,” Ponomarev says. “The rest of the cache is shared. The private partition is sufficient to keep most of the side-channel information from an attacker. About 1 or 2 percent of the sensitive infor-

mation could leak, far from enough information to reconstruct a key.” The approach does not call for hiding 100 percent of the information, AbuGhazaleh notes. “For that, you have to completely separate the cores,” he says. “We keep the sharing, but this small private partition is enough to filter out most of the critical information.” Ponomarev and Abu-Ghazaleh say their solution is inexpensive and easy to do with just a few extra transistors and less than a 1 percent cost in terms of performance. They collaborated on a prototype evaluated with a colleague at Intel as well as on a paper published this year in the journal ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. “These are advanced attacks,” AbuGhazaleh says. “People are just becoming aware of their impact. But they’re powerful enough that we have to be aware of them as we build these machines.” — Rachel Coker

IN GOOD COMPANY
Binghamton’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is home to a number of internationally recognized experts in information security, including Scott Craver, Jessica Fridrich and Victor Skormin:
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Craver, a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), specializes in evading, breaking and reverse-engineering digital watermark security. Fridrich has developed technology that links digital images to the camera with which they were taken, in much the same way that tell-tale scratches can link bullets to the gun that fired them. Skormin is interested in the use of biologically inspired methods to improve computer security. His book Immunocomputing laid the mathematical foundation for applying immune methods in computing.

Binghamton University • BINGHAMTON RESEARCH • Spring/Summer 2012

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Hardware concepts developed at Binghamton could lead to improved information security.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012

Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012
Contents
About Binghamton Research
Welcome
Briefs
Digital defenders
Jockeying for genetic advantage
The unfiltered truth
Spring awakening
Wall Street watchdog
Principles of the universe demand principled engineers
Engineering and Science Building
Graduate research
Undergraduate research
A piece of the puzzle
Crossword puzzle

Binghamton Research Magazine - Spring/Summer 2012