Monthly Archives: June 2018

After entering a password, your regular computer keyboard might appear to look the same as always, but a new approach harvesting thermal energy can illuminate the recently pressed keys, revealing that keyboard-based password entry is even less secure than previously thought. Computer Science Ph.D. students Tyler Kaczmarek and Ercan Ozturk in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), working with Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik, have exploited thermal residue from human fingertips to introduce a new insider attack — the Thermanator.

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Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik and two of his Ph.D. students, Tyler Kaczmarek and Ercan Ozturk, have developed a novel technique aimed at mitigating “Lunchtime Attacks.” Such attacks occur when an insider adversary takes over an authenticated state of a careless user who has left his or her computer unattended. Tsudik, Kaczmarek and Ozturk have come up with an unobtrusive and continuous biometic-based “de-authentication,” i.e., a means of quickly terminating the secure session of a previously authenticated user after detecting that user’s absence. They introduce the new biometric, called Assentication, in a paper appearing at the 2018 International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS).

In a paper to appear at the 2018 European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), a team of researchers from UC Irvine, New York Institute of Technology and University of Padova (Italy) reveal a new attack: Secret Information Leakage from Keystroke Timing Videos (SILK-TV). The UCI researchers include Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik and undergrad exchange students Martin Georgiev and Nikita Samarian.  

Watch the "Cybersecurity: Defending our Digital Domains" luncheon video featuring UCI's Bryan Cunningham as a panelist.