Attack Prevention and Forecasting Research Receives ONR Funding

 

Michalis Polychronakis, Long Lu, and R. Sekar, all professors of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, received a grant from the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research (ONR) for their research project on Software Diversification for Attack Prevention and Forecasting.

“We are excited to continue our research on improving software security with the support of ONR,” Polychronakis said. “This project will focus on hardening existing software against attacks that take advantage of software vulnerabilities---bugs or weaknesses that can lead to security issues---by introducing diversity at multiple layers in a program's structure and operation.”

Polychronakis, whose research interests include network and system security and network monitoring and measurement, received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece.  Prior to joining the Stony Brook faculty, Polychronakis was an associate research scientist at Columbia University.

Lu’s research interests are also aimed at securing software and systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Sekar, who received his PhD in Computer Science from Stony Brook University, operates the Secure Systems Lab on campus.

Combing their collaborative work in system security, Polychronakis, Lu, and Sekar, will continue their research through a grant from the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research, which began in July.

“Realizing that attackers will continuously discover new vulnerabilities in critical software, in this project we aim to develop practical protections based on software diversification that will unpredictably influence the ways in which programs react to exploitation attempts, and thus hinder the construction and prevent the execution of reliable attacks,” Polychronakis said.