Systems and Network Security
Dr. Vasserman and the SyNeSec Lab focus on cross-disciplinary research on medical and cyber-physical system security and usability, including authentication, authorization, access control, ease of use, and education. The lab has produced results in Byzantine interoperability failure detection through the use of “smart” functional alarms in medical systems, non-intrusive black- and gray-box software integrity checking using power consumption and electromagnetic emissions of integrated circuits (which can detect changes as subtle as single instructions and/or operands). The SyNeSec lab has tackled the areas of security usability, risk perception (with the Department of Psychological Sciences), and security education (with the Department of Physics) and just-in-time intervention for novice users. SyNeSec and the SAnToS high-assurance software labs are currently working on an integrated safety-security co-design program as well as software analysis and development tools to assist safety engineers in designing secure systems, even when the safety engineer may not have extensive (or any) security training.
