Latest News
“Cloudy With a Chance of Misbehavior”: Researching Malicious Traffic originating from Cloud Machines
ISI researcher Jelena Mirkovic and students team up to research cloud providers and the “misbehavior” that occurs on these platforms.
The Block Busters: USC Researchers Find New Methods to Quantify IP Blocklisting
Internet users can suddenly be locked out of a website because their IP address gets flagged. How does this happen?
USC ISI Cybersecurity Expert Terry Benzel Elected to IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors
In her new position, Benzel will serve as an IEEE Board member and a member of the Diversity & Inclusion Committee.
SPECIAL EVENTS
TACM CCS 2021 CheckMATE Workshop
The CheckMATE workshop will be collocated with the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2021 on November 19, 2021. MATE –– Man-At-The-End –– is an attack model where an adversary has access to the target software and/or hardware environment of its victim. The focus of this workshop is on new models and techniques to defend against software tampering, reverse engineering and piracy, to also include attack strategies that highlight the need for more comprehensive defenses.
Cross-Cutting Research Areas
Cyber-Physical Systems
Understanding, securing and advancing cyber-physical systems is embodied in our work on embedded systems, verification of untrusted cyber-physical modules and analysis of cyber-attacks on interconnected complex cyber-physical systems. As “smart” devices continue to connect to the internet at a rapid pace, optimizing and securing their integration is critical -- in addition to protecting underlying infrastructure, such as the power grid, that is the heartbeat of cyber ecosystems.
Edge Computing
As demand for information transit speed increases exponentially, there are hard questions around Network Embedding, System Security, and the use of Advanced Encryption Mechanisms. New approaches to data storage and computation capabilities at the edge inform our work in identification of applications within encrypted flows, recognition of obscured payloads, and protection of sensitive data residing in or transiting through network slices. This work will contribute to secure, high performance edge computing for the next generation of networking.
Cybersecurity
The pervasive nature of cyber threats grows exponentially. Our research spans specific technologies to large scale experimentation and analysis. Some of our key research programs include privacy-safe data sharing, defending against denial of service, malware handling and management, and binary analysis.
Internet Measurement
Our goal is to improve the Internet by discovering new ways to understand network topology, traffic, use and abuse. We explore challenges in networking and cybersecurity from several perspectives. We develop and operate unique network measurement and analysis Infrastructure that we employ to address important problems in network reliability and security. Our research builds models to assist with real world dilemmas, such as natural disasters and power grid outages, to enhance internet agility and robustness.
Experimental Research Methodologies
Conducting experimentation to explore and evaluate research in cybersecurity and networking requires new scientific methods, tools, and infrastructure. As a leader in cyber experimentation we architect, develop, and operate advanced cyber infrastructure testbeds. Our work creates models, experimentation frameworks, tools, and approaches to enhance the science of cyber experimentation to make experiments reusable, repeatable and robust.
