The Distributed Systems and Security group within the Systems and Networking area conducts research into distributed systems and various aspects of computer security.

Distributed Systems

[ Summary under construction ]

Security

Security research in DSS includes the following topics:

• Network Security: Protecting end hosts against network-based attacks, including protocol vulnerability exploits, browser vulnerability exploits, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and others. (See, for example, the Shield project.)
• Usable Security: Making secure practices and security management feasible and comprehensible for ordinary users.
• Virtual Machine-based Isolation: Protecting end hosts against compromise by isolating potentially compromised code using virtual machines.
People

Primary Contact: Rich Draves
Photo Not Available Douceur, John	Elson, Jeremy	Photo Not Available Fan, Xiaofeng	Howell, Jon
Photo Not Available Schechter, Stuart	Simon, Dan
Affiliate Members
Draves, Rich	Lorch, Jay	Moscibroda, Thomas	Tan, Kun

Projects
• Shield
Publications
Shield:


• ShieldGen: Automated Data Patch Generation for Unknown Vulnerabilities with Informed Probing
  Weidong Cui, Marcus Peinado, Helen J. Wang and Michael Locasto
  IEEE Security and Privacy 2007
• BrowserShield: Vulnerability-Driven Filtering of Dynamic HTML
  Charlie Reis, John Dunagan, Helen J. Wang, Opher Dubrovsky, and Saher Esmeir
  OSDI 2006
• Finding Diversity in Remote Code Injection Exploits
  Justin Ma, John Dunagan, Helen J. Wang, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker
  Internet Measurement Conference, October, 2006
• A Generic Application-Level Protocol Analyzer and its Language
  Nikita Borisov, David J. Brumley, Helen J. Wang, John Dunagan, Pallavi Joshi, and Chuanxiong Guo
  The 14th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), Feb, 2007
  Previous version: Oct 2005 [pdf]
  (MSR technical report, Feb 2005)
• Shield: Vulnerability-Driven Network Filters for Preventing Known Vulnerability Exploits
  Helen J. Wang, Chuanxiong Guo, Daniel R. Simon, and Alf Zugenmaier
  ACM SIGCOMM, August, 2004


Usable Security:


• An Evaluation of Extended Validation and Picture-in-Picture Phishing Attacks
  Collin Jackson, Daniel R. Simon, Desney S. Tan, and Adam Barth
  Proc. USEC '07