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Kevin Dennis Wins the Student Best Paper award at IEEE TPS

Professor Ligatti and his student Kevin Dennis collaborated with researchers from MIT, including CSE Alumnae Dr. Shamaria Engram, on a new language and graphical tool to simplify Data Provenance Policies for Function-as-a-Service programs on cloud computing platforms. The resulting work won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems, and Applications (IEEE TPS).

The shift to cloud computing has democratized large scale development. Small developers can now create and maintain grand-scale applications. Although, one tradeoff of this shift is potential security risks. Data Provenance is a method of tracking the who, what, how, and when of data access, and offers a robust solution to the problem. However, writing these policies is an error prone and technical task, and the size of these databases can make proactive protection difficult at scale. As such, provenance-based analysis tools have primarily been used in forensic analysis.

The solution developed by USF and MIT researchers uses a GUI interface and a new language to aim at both flexibility and simplicity. Expert policy writers can create a suite of options which users apply in a tree structure to different use cases. This allows for a proactive approach to this powerful security tool.

To read the award-winning paper, visit here.