Research in Cyber Security
The security team led by Prof. Barton Miller at the University Wisconsin is working on several areas of research that we describe during talk. The first area is the analysis, monitoring, and control of malicious programs. The research is based on a hybrid static/dynamic technique that monitors known code in a binary, and then discovers new code as it is decoded, unpacked, and modified, guaranteeing that we can monitor and control the code before it is executed. This research is being incorporated in the Dyninst binary instrumentation tool suite. The second area is the use of advanced machine learning techniques to expose the provinance of binary programs. These techniques can report the source language(s) in which the program was written, the compiler used and the optimization level. In addition, we can also identify the author of the program solely from the binary code. The last area of research is our joint work with the Autonomous University of Barcelona on the in-depth vulnerability assessment of middleware and services. The work at Wisconsin includes a technique called self-propelled instrumentation, that can be injecting into a running program and trace its behavior, and propagate this tracing in other processes, even on other hosts.