Full CV

Career Timeline

I entered the Computer Science department at the U of I in the Fall of 2005. I work in Dr. Carl Gunter's Illinois Security Lab (ISL).  I plan to graduate in May 2011 and am seeking employment opportunities with starting dates soon after that.

Prior to joining ISL, I performed undergraduate research with Dr. Jack Tan and Dr. Michael Wick at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Research Interests and Approach

One of the reasons that current computer systems suffer from security and reliability deficiencies is that they lack a solid root of trust, meaning that their lowest layers do not provide sufficiently strong security and reliability services.  This has been particularly true of embedded systems (such as advanced electric meters) that have stringent resource requirements.  This lack of security and reliability can hinder embedded systems from being deployed in certain applications.

Throughout my research career, I have analyzed the security and reliability requirements of various applications, particularly those involving embedded systems.  In response to such analyses, I have proposed and developed solutions that demonstrate how those requirements can be practically satisfied.  My fundamental focus has been on the processor and operating system layers of the systems.  I have also devised system structures to better support security and reliability.  I place a strong emphasis on designing and constructing convincing prototypes using technologies such as printed circuit boards, ZigBee radios, microcontrollers, FPGAs, etc.  I also design systems to be amenable to formal analysis and have analyzed systems with respect to traditional security requirements as well as unconventional requirements drawn from the unique challenges faced by embedded systems in adverse environments.

My core security and reliability research has peripherally exposed me to other rapidly-developing research areas, and some of my papers address pressing issues within those areas.

I have worked to foster collaboration within the security research community at the U of I by participating in and for a few semesters managing the Security Reading Group.  It brings together researchers from the CS and ECE departments for deep discussions of select research papers.

Advanced Electric Meter Security

Upon entering the U of I, I joined the Trustworthy Cyber-Infrastructure for Power (TCIP) project.  A group of us within that project identified Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) as an area with significant and increasing security and privacy vulnerabilities.  We then set about describing and addressing those vulnerabilities.  Our first paper on the subject discussed our findings and proposed a general architecture for a secure and privacy-preserving advanced meter.  A key finding from that paper and subsequent research is that remote attestation in meters is critical for cost-effectively detecting and responding to attacks on AMI.  Remote attestation is a technology that enables a remote party to securely determine whether a system in the field is running known and trusted software

Cumulative Remote Attestation for Embedded System Integrity

Remote attestation schemes for PCs are not ideal for use in embedded systems for a variety of reasons.  First, embedded systems like advanced meters are often deployed to the field and then operate independently for long periods of time.  In contrast, PC applications that are measured using attestation are typically measured when they first connect to some server, and then maintain a connection with that server for as long as they are used.  Second, embedded systems have strict resource constraints.  Thus, a new remote attestation scheme was needed for such systems.  We describe our scheme in our 2009 ESORICS paper.  We developed a "cumulative attestation" scheme that maintains a log (with special support for handling space overflows) of all firmware ever installed on the system.  We prototyped it on an Atmel AVR32 AT32UC3A0512 microcontroller which has only 512KiB of flash and 64KiB of SRAM total.  Unlike TPM-based remote attestation schemes, it can be implemented entirely in software.  We formally verified that the prototype satisfies certain critical requirements, including the ability to recover from arbitrary, repeated power failures during flash writes.

Current Research

Currently, I am developing technologies to reduce the trusted computing base of remote attestation schemes and harden them in other ways.