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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Lindsey Panetta, lindsey.panetta@gtri.gatech.edu
Summary Sentence: Georgia Tech’s Cybersecurity Lecture Series welcomes Mathias Payer of Purdue University.
Full Summary: Georgia Tech’s free and open-to-the-public Cybersecurity Lecture Series welcomes Mathias Payer, a security researcher and assistant professor in computer science at Purdue University, leading the HexHive group.
Cybersecurity Lecture Series by IISP
Mathias PayerMemory corruption has plagued systems since the dawn of computing. With the rise of defense techniques (such as stack cookies, ASLR, and DEP), attacks have become much more complicated, yet control-flow hijack attacks are still prevalent. Attacks rely on code reuse, often leveraging some form of information disclosure. Stronger defense mechanisms have been proposed but none have seen wide deployment so far due to the time it takes to deploy a security mechanism, the incompatibility with systems/software, and most severely due to performance overhead. In this talk, we evaluate the security benefits and limitations of the status quo and look into upcoming defense mechanisms (and their attacks).
Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) and Code-Pointer Integrity (CPI) are two of the hottest upcoming defense mechanisms. CFI guarantees that the runtime control flow follows the statically determined control-flow graph. An attacker may reuse any of the valid transitions at any control-flow transfer. CPI on the other hand is a dynamic property that enforces memory safety guarantees integrity of code pointers by separating code pointers from regular data. We will discuss differences and advantages/disadvantages of both approaches, especially considering their security guarantees and performance impacts, and look at strategies to defend against other attack vectors like type confusion.
Mathias Payer is a security researcher and an assistant professor in computer science at Purdue University, leading the HexHive group. His research focuses on protecting applications even in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption. He is interested in system security, binary exploitation, software-based fault isolation, binary translation/recompilation, and virtualization. In 2014, he founded the “b01lers” Purdue “Capture the Flag” team. Before joining Purdue in 2014, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in Dawn Song's BitBlaze group at the University of California Berkeley. He graduated from ETH Zurich with a Doctor of Sciences in 2012. All implementation prototypes from his group are open-source.
Organized by the Institute for Information Security & Privacy, the free and open-to-the-public Cybersecurity Lecture Series meets throughout the fall each Friday at Noon on the Georgia Tech campus, August – December. Invited speakers include executives and researchers from Fortune 500 companies, federal intelligence agencies, start-ups and incubators, as well as Georgia Tech faculty and students presenting their research.
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