Everyone is encouraged (required? expected?) to present their ongoing work to the group. Email Ahren Studer (astuder AT cmu.edu) with title and abstract if you want control over the date on which you present. We have tried two presenters per meeting (Fall 2007) and found that we generally run short on time. Thus, one presenter per meeting.

Policy change: We will allow practice talks if the talk itself consumes less than 30 minutes of the session, so that we have the remaining time for discussion. However, work-in-progress receives higher priority than practice talks, and we are striving for at least half of our meetings to cover work-in-progress.

All CSS meetings are at noon on FRIDAYS (note the change from previous semesters!) and include lunch. We have CIC 2101 reserved but suits and checkbooks have the power to preempt us.

• Jan 23, 2009 CIC 2101
  Canceled due to regular CyLab Seminar.
• Jan 30, 2009 CIC 2201 Location Change
  Josh Sunshine and Serge Egelman. Crying Wolf: An Empirical Study on Context-Sensitive SSL Warning Design
  Abstract: Due to the prevalence of certificate errors, users have become habituated to SSL warnings. We conducted a survey of over 600 Internet users to examine their reactions to the current SSL warning messages, whether they understood what the different errors mean, and how they perceive the associated risk levels. We then redesigned an SSL warning to prevent habituation by taking context into account. Our new warning is more severe when users are visiting websites where they are likely to be entering personal information so that they do not become habituated to seeing the warning in lower-risk situations. We conducted a laboratory study of 100 participants in order to evaluate our new warning against the current SSL warnings used by Firefox and Internet Explorer. We found that users were significantly more likely to obey our warning when they were conducting online banking---where an SSL error should be cause for alarm---than when they were visiting a non-commercial website that did not collect personal information. Among the other warnings, user behaviors did not vary based on context: users either ignored the warnings on both websites---putting themselves at risk---or they obeyed the warnings at both websites, which causes an inconvenience by preventing them from accessing legitimate websites.
• Feb. 20, 2009 CIC 2201
  Kami Vaniea. Real life challenges in access-control management
  Abstract: In this work we ask the question: what are the challenges of managing a physical or file system access-control policy for a large organization? To answer the question, we conducted a series of interviews of thirteen administrators who manage access-control policy for either a file system or a physical space. Based on these interviews we identified three sets of real-world requirements that are either ignored or inadequately addressed by technology: 1) policies are made/implemented by multiple people; 2) policy makers are distinct from policy implementers; 3) access-control systems don't always have the capability to implement the desired policy. In this paper we will present the results of our interviews and put forward several possible solutions that would address issues we observed.
• Feb 27, 2009 CIC 2101
  Mark Poepping. Roughly 30 minutes of presentation. The high level overview is data, designing an experiment with the data, and ramifications wrt IRB and privacy issues.
• Mar 6, 2009 CIC 2101
  Janice Tsai. The Impact of Prominent Privacy Information
  Privacy is not dead. Rather, people continue to be extremely concerned about their privacy online. Despite these concerns, people are unable to easily act according to their privacy preferences. This may be due to the difficulty of accessing relevant privacy information. Similarly, these privacy concerns may be hindering people from adopting new technologies. In this talk, I describe two studies that examine the impact of prominent privacy information on privacy concerns and behavior. I focus on the impact of privacy information on the decision-making process when people make purchases online, and how feedback changes people's privacy concerns when they share their locations online. I find that prominent privacy information has a significant impact on which website users choose to make purchases from, and that feedback is a required element in the use and acceptance of mobile location-sharing applications.
• Mar 27, 2009 NSH 1305
  Benjamin Johnson. The Price of Uncertainty in Security Games
  In this talk I will give an overview of our group's recent results in the area of economics of network security. We study a game-theoretic model in which individuals within a network choose selfishly between protection -- a public good, and insurance -- a private good, in response to security threats. I will introduce this model, review some results from earlier work, and discuss current research in which we study the effects of limiting the information that is available to players about the security threats of others. I will include some graphs and pictures, and make an effort to keep the talk interesting and at an introductory level.
• Apr 3, 2009 CIC 2101
  Janice Tsai. Who's Viewed You? The Impact of Feedback in a Mobile Location-Sharing Application
  Feedback is viewed as an essential element of ubiquitous computing systems in the HCI literature for helping people manage their privacy. However, the success of online social networks and existing commercial systems for mobile location sharing which do not incorporate feedback would seem to call the importance of feedback into question. We investigated this issue in the context of a mobile location sharing system. Specifically, we report on the findings of a field deployment of Locyoution, a mobile location sharing system. In our study of 56 users, one group was given feedback in the form of a history of location requests, and a second group was given no feedback at all. Our major contribution has been to show that feedback is an important contributing factor towards improving user comfort levels and allaying privacy concerns. Participants' privacy concerns were reduced after using the mobile location sharing system. Additionally, our study suggests that peer opinion and technical savviness contribute most to whether or not participants thought they would continue to use a mobile location technology.
• Apr 10, 2009 CIC 2101
  Michael Abd-el-Malek. File system virtual appliances: Portable file system implementations
  File system virtual appliances (FSVAs) address the portability headaches that plague file system (FS) developers. By packaging their FS implementation in a VM, separate from the VM that runs user applications, they can avoid the need to port the file system to each OS and OS version. A small FS-agnostic proxy, maintained by the core OS developers, connects the FSVA to whatever OS the user chooses. This paper describes an FSVA design that maintains FS semantics for unmodified FS implementations and provides desired OS and virtualization features, such as a unified buffer cache and VM migration. Evaluation of prototype FSVA implementations in Linux and NetBSD, using Xen as the VMM, demonstrates that the FSVA architecture is efficient, FS-agnostic, and able to insulate file system implementations from OS differences that would otherwise require explicit porting.
• May 1, 2009 CIC 2201
  Amit Vasudevan. XTREC: Secure Real-time Instruction-level Control Flow Recording on Commodity Platforms
  I will talk about XTREC, a primitive that can record the execution control flow information of a system in real time with 100% accuracy. Furthermore, XTREC is robust to compromise which provides integrity of the control flow log. We have implemented XTREC on the AMD SVM platform running Windows. The only software component that is trusted in the system during runtime is XTREC itself, whose security sensitive portion is less than 1100 lines of code which makes it amenable to formal verification to ensure security and safety. Our experimental results show that our framework latency is minimal for realistic applications and that the approach is viable for enterprise settings.
• May 8, 2009 CIC 2201
  Brandon Salmon. Perspective: Semantic data management for the home
  Perspective is a storage system designed for the home, with the decentralization and flexibility sought by home users and a new semantic filesystem construct, the view, to simplify management. A view is a semantic description of a set of files, specified as a query on file attributes, and the ID of the device on which they are stored. By examining and modifying the views associated with a device, a user can identify and control the files stored on it. This approach allows users to reason about what is stored where in the same way (semantic naming) as they navigate their digital content. Thus, in serving as their own administrators, users do not have to deal with a second data organization scheme (hierarchical naming) to perform replica management tasks, such as specifying redundancy to increase reliability and data partitioning to address device capacity exhaustion. Experiences with Perspective deployments and user studies confirm the efficacy of view-based data management.
• May 22, 2009 CIC 2101
  Timothy Vidas. Presentation on Potential CERT Projects
  CERT is looking for students that have interest in working on projects in a number of areas including: cryptography, text and file analysis, device fabrication, video processing, and surveys. Overall, students should be "self starters" by nature, should not be adverse to programming (in general, the language is not important), should be a solid technical writers with good communications skills. Creation of documentation is not a focus, but academic papers will likely stem from a good deal of this work.

About CSS

The group is semi-formal, in that one person begins by presenting their ongoing work (if it is accepted for publication, it is too polished; we like the rough stuff). Meetings are considered to be a success when discussion takes over and the presentation does not proceed as planned. The main point of CSS is to stay abreast of what our local peers are up to while helping them to refine and improve their work.

We encourage researchers of all abilities to attend, from undergrads to faculty. We encourage people to ask questions, even those that may seem "stupid", as they often lead to interesting discussions and insights. Example discussion and questions may include:

• What exactly is the problem solved? Often it is hard to understand exactly what problem is really being solved by the solution. An intro may have very general statements about a very vague problem, while the solution has many assumptions built in.
• Do you buy the solution? Do you think in reality the solution won't work, is too expensive, etc..
• What improvements can be made?
• What paper/advancement would you expect to be made next in this area?

Mailing Lists

We maintain an Andrew mailing list called "cylab-student-seminar". You can subscribe/unsubscribe/view archives via the CSS mailman site.

The email address is cylab-student-seminar@lists.andrew.cmu.edu. E-mail to the list and archives is restricted to CMU accounts.

Archives

• Fall 2008
• Spring 2008
• Fall 2007