•   When: Tuesday, March 22, 2022 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
•   Speakers: Qiang Zeng
•   Location: ZOOM only
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Abstract:  A smart environment (such as a smart home or factory) is a complex system, involving IoT devices, servers, communication protocols, the physical environment, humans, etc. These entities interact and interfere with each other, raising many unique security questions. An interdisciplinary approach, which combines knowledge and techniques from different domains, is vital to identify and address such questions. I will share how an interdisciplinary approach is applied to two IoT security projects. (1) The first one (Oakland’22) reveals novel IoT attacks, named Phantom-Delay Attacks, that exploit a design vulnerability in existing IoT protocol stacks. They impact billions of IoT devices and have been acknowledged by Google, Ring, and SimpliSafe. (2) The second (CCS’20) builds a highly secure and usable IoT pairing technique, which can be applied to heterogeneous IoT devices. It is resilient to man-in-the-middle attacks without needing any passwords.  The successes of both projects can be attributed to an interdisciplinary approach that considers the interaction of different entities in a smart environment.

Bio: Dr. Qiang Zeng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of South Carolina. He received his Ph.D. from Penn State University. His main research interest is Computer Systems Security, with a current focus on Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. His work covers different layers of computing systems, such as hypervisors, kernels, application frameworks, and applications. He publishes papers in Oakland, CCS, USENIX Security, NDSS, MobiCom, MobiSys, and PLDI. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award.