Outstanding Student Hannah Pruse Nominee for Goldwater Scholarship
Outstanding undergraduate Hannah Pruse is one of four students selected by the University of Oregon as nominees for the nationally prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was created in 1986 to encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, natural sciences, or engineering and to foster excellence in those fields. Up to 300 recipients are selected from nominations by universities and colleges across the country.
In her application, Ms. Pruse described research she is doing with Dr. Kevin Butler on co-residency detection in the cloud infrastructure. This research aims to demonstrate the severity of the co-resident threat, in which virtual machines (VMs) on a cloud could be sharing resources with unknown and untrusted parties. Hannah assisted in developing an attack that compromises the isolation of VMs by allowing co-residents to exfiltrate co-residency information through a watermark injected into the target VM’s network flow.
This study has been described in detail in the research group’s publication “Seeding the Cloud: Detecting Co-Residency with Network Flow Watermarking,” which is currently in submission to the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
Congratulations, Hannah and Kevin! An announcement about the Goldwater Scholarship finalists is expected in March.