Publications

The gap between data production and user ability to access, compute and produce meaningful results calls for tools that address the challenges associated with big data volume, velocity and variety. One of the key hurdles is the inability to methodically remove expected or uninteresting elements from large data sets. This...

Biometrics were originally developed for identification, such as for criminal investigations. More recently, biometrics have been also utilized for authentication. Most biometric authentication systems today match a user's biometric reading against a stored reference template generated during enrollment. If the reading and the template are sufficiently close, the authentication is...

Memory corruption attacks continue to be a major vector of attack for compromising modern systems. Numerous defenses have been proposed against memory corruption attacks, but they all have their limitations and weaknesses. Stronger defenses such as complete memory safety for legacy languages (C/C++) incur a large overhead, while weaker ones...

Leakage resilient cryptography designs systems to withstand partial adversary knowledge of secret state. Ideally, leakage-resilient systems withstand current and future attacks; restoring confidence in the security of implemented cryptographic systems. Understanding the relation between classes of leakage functions is an important aspect. In this work, we consider the memory leakage...

Organizations that make use of large quantities of information require the ability to store and process data from central locations so that the product can be shared or distributed across a heterogeneous group of users. However, recent events underscore the need for improving the security of data stored in such...

The decreasing costs and increasing speed and accuracy of DNA sample collection, preparation, and sequencing has rapidly produced an enormous volume of genetic data. However, fast and accurate analysis of the samples remains a bottleneck. Here we present D4RAGenS, a genetic sequence identification algorithm that exhibits the Big Data handling...

Researchers are making secure multiparty computation--a cryptographic technique that enables information sharing and analysis while keeping sensitive inputs secret--faster and easier to use for application software developers.

In this work, we present a generic open-source software framework that can evaluate the correctness and performance of homomorphic encryption software. Our framework, called HEtest, automates the entire process of a test: generation of data for testing (such as circuits and inputs), execution of a test, comparison of performance to...

Current metagenomic analysis algorithms require significant computing resources, can report excessive false positives (type I errors), may miss organisms (type II errors/false negatives), or scale poorly on large datasets. This paper explores using big data database technologies to characterize very large metagenomic DNA sequences in protein space, with the ultimate...

This work presents the results of a three-year project that assessed nine different privacy-preserving data search systems. We detail the design of a software assessment framework that focuses on low system footprint, repeatability, and reusability. A unique achievement of this project was the automation and integration of the entire test...