Butler Awarded NSF Grant for Study Security of Portable Storage Devices
Professor Kevin Butler has received a three-year, $499,500 grant from the National Science Foundation's Trustworthy Computing program to study the security of portable storage devices. Flash drives and other portable media have become virtually ubiquitous in daily life, since they are convenient to carry around and hold gigabytes of information. They pose real security risks to organizations and governments, however; in a widely-reported case, classified data leaked from military networks was exfiltrated to portable media and found its way to WikiLeaks, leading to a ban on flash drives by the Department of Defense.
As principal investigator on this grant, Prof. Butler will be examining why these devices are so insecure and aims to discover security mechanisms that not only protect computers from rogue flash drives, but also protects trusted flash drives that are plugged into malicious computers. He and his students in the Oregon Systems Infrastructure Research and Information Security (OSIRIS) Lab will be looking at issues such as identity, authentication, and data integrity, and applications such as using flash drives for forensics investigations. The group will also investigate how new ways of interfacing with computers (such as Apple's new Thunderbolt protocol) and how new types of storage devices interacting with host computers can affect security. This grant follows on the heels of Prof. Butler's $262,000 award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force to study cryptographic methods of preserving privacy on mobile phones.
More information on Prof. Butler's research can be found on his web page, at http://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~butler.