EECS Seminar: Staying Ahead of the Arms Race in Cybersecurity - Realizing Effective Attack Discovery and Mitigation for Legacy and Future Networked Systems

Abstract: The state of the art in cybersecurity is often an arms race between adversaries actively exploiting various vulnerabilities and defenders rushing to patch the systems to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of such attacks. As the quality of our life becomes increasingly dependent on emerging cyberphysical systems such as autonomous vehicles, this reactive approach to security puts us in serious jeopardy. In this talk, I will survey several recent research efforts from my group on addressing security challenges in both the age-old DNS system and wildly popular mobile systems, as well as the emerging IoT and autonomous vehicular application domains. Taking a proactive approach, we propose to build secure systems by design that can systematically eliminate a class of vulnerabilities by applying formalisms from domains such as programming languages as well as by providing security guarantees in the platform.

Bio: Z. Morley Mao is a professor at the University of Michigan, having earned her doctorate at UC Berkeley on robust Internet routing protocol design and effective network measurement techniques to uncover network properties. She is a recipient of the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the ARMY YIP Award and an IBM Faculty Award. Her other honors include the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor, EECS Achievement Award and the College of Engineering George J. Huebner, Jr. Research Excellence Award at University of Michigan. Her current research focus encompasses software-defined networking, AV security, network security, next-generation Internet protocols and mobile systems.