The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security

Limin Jia - Carnegie Mellon University

Students: Spring 2025, unless noted otherwise, sessions will be virtual on Zoom.

Information Flow Security in Practical Systems

Apr 12, 2017

Download: Video Icon MP4 Video Size: 372.6MB  
Watch on Youtube Watch on YouTube

Abstract

Users routinely type sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers, and even SSN into their mobile phone apps and browsers. Rich functionality combined with weak security mechanisms makes protecting users' data a challenging. In this talk, I will present a few case studies of applying information flow security to protecting users' data in Android, the Chromium browser, and the IFTTT framework. For these systems, we show that dynamic coarse-grained taint tracking, even though it allows implicit flows, can be retrofitted into existing systems to defend users' data from common attacks. I will explain the challenges in striking a balance between preserving key functionality of legacy systems and ensuring formally provable security guarantees and discuss how different modeling techniques affect noninterference proofs.

About the Speaker

Limin Jia
Dr. Jia is an Assistant Research Professor in the ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Jia received her PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University. She received her BE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Science and Technology in China. Dr. Jia's research interests are in formal aspects of software security, in particular, applying formal approaches to constructing software systems with known security guarantees.


Ways to Watch

YouTube

Watch Now!

Over 500 videos of our weekly seminar and symposia keynotes are available on our YouTube Channel. Also check out Spaf's YouTube Channel. Subscribe today!