Seminar Series: Using Hardware-aided Trusted Execution Technology to Secure IoT Data Processing

Organized by The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the School of Information Technology, and the Department of Political Science at UC

Using Hardware-aided Trusted Execution Technology to Secure IoT Data Processing

Monday March 11, 2019 / 813 Rhodes / 11am – 12.30pm

Wenhai Sun

Internet of Things intertwines the physical and cyber worlds and is designed to control critical aspects and functions of our daily life. With the rapid growth of IoT devices that usually operate on low power consumption mode with constrained resources and produce an enormous amount of sensitive data, the software-based cryptographic approach currently is often inadequate or even not applicable to meet a variety of requirements for secure IoT data processing. In this talk, I will introduce our recent work that exploits the advance of hardware-based trusted execution technology to build secure, performant and unified IoT data processing framework. The proposed framework enables a broad range of IoT application services. Specifically, we will target one of the fundamental data services, search function, to demonstrate its satisfactory performance with our implementation. In addition, we also consider the challenging service revocation problem and present solutions in a hostile environment where system resources are controlled by malicious adversaries. I will also discuss the insufficiency by using conventional “divide-and-conquer” strategy to compartmentalize/eliminate the individual threat and show the urgent need for innovative solutions with emerging technologies.   

Bio: Dr Wenhai Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology and the Faculty member of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) of Purdue University. He holds two PhD degrees in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and in Cryptography from Xidian University, respectively.  His study covers various topics in cybersecurity research with the focus on security and privacy issues in networked information systems and cyber-physical systems, including cloud computing, distributed ledger network, Internet of Things, computer/mobile systems, and wireless network. He has published papers in top security and networking conferences and prestigious journals. He won the Distinguished Paper Award in ACM ASIACCS 2013. He was the recipient of Pratt Fellowship from Virginia Tech. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.