Internet Security Research Lab

Paul Porter successfully presented his thesis proposal today to his graduate committee.

Title: Trust Negotiation for Open Database Access Control

Paul’s research will integrate concepts from trust negotiation into database authentication and access control. This will result in a database system that can be accessed by qualified outsiders. He will focus on Hippocratic databases that support strong privacy guarantees for protecting sensitive personal information. The database subjects are able to set the access control requirements regarding who can access their data.

Jason Holt presented a talk on LogCrypt yesterday at the Australasian Information Security Workshop in Hobart, Tasmania.

See talk slides

At this week’s lab meeting, Nathan Seeley will be giving a presentation entitled “The Essentials of Code Access Security.” The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, 12 January 2006 at 3:00 pm and will be held in the main ISRL lab, room 2221 of the Talmage Building (TMCB). We would like to invite any and all who are interested to attend. Similar meetings will be held throughout the semester, see this page for more details as they become available.

Abstract:

Java and .NET have a sophisticated, configurable way of minimizing the risks of executing certain application code by restricting this code to a limited set of operations. This allows cautious users to be as safe as possible while still allowing potentially valuable applications to run. This improved model allows one to authenticate the author of the code and set policies restricting what resources the foreign code can access based on that authentication. My presentation will cover the basics of this model and will contrast the differences between the Java and the .NET approach.

If you’ve been here before, you’ll probably notice that there has been quite a dramatic change to this site. We are currently in the process of updating our site and transitioning to a blog-centric layout. Please excuse any odd behavior for the next week or so, as the transition is finalized. If you would like to view the old version of the website in the interim, click here.

At the same time, the old Yoda machine that used to serve as both our public web server as well as an internal file/cvs server has gone into hiding (although not quite so far as Dagobah). It is now no-longer accessible directly from outside the lab. The younger and hopefully more diplomatic Padme has taken it’s place as the public face of the ISRL. At the moment, the DNS situation is a little murky (yoda.cs.byu.edu points to padme), but as soon as the CS department system administrators come back from vacation, the entries for yoda.cs.byu.edu and padme.cs.byu.edu will be fixed.