News

Prof. Mosharaf Chowdhury is leading development of a new machine learning application that will protect the privacy of participants.

Election security expert J. Alex Halderman dissects Antrim County’s election debacle to help future contests go more smoothly.

Madhyastha has focused on making undergraduate upper level courses reflect the changing needs of industry.

This project is part of Kapritsos’ larger goal of bringing formal verification to developers and other practitioners.

A Q&A with Kevin Fu, who will help protect software that saves lives at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

The longtime advocate and leading researcher in medical device security heads to Washington for a one-year term.

Microphones that “hear” light; microprocessors that “tell” us secrets; self-driving cars that “see” fake objects; sensors that “feel” the wrong temperature. Our devices are under attack in new, increasingly sophisticated ways. Security researchers at CSE are exploring the limits of hardware and finding new, sobering vulnerabilities in our computers and homes.

How automated guarantees that our most complex programs are secure and trustworthy can save us time, money, and anxiety.

Chowdhury is an expert in network-informed data systems design for big data and AI applications.

Today, over 225 million websites are protected by free certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.

The winning paper broke open a new area of investigation in hardware-based data leaks.

The competition recognizes the research done by PhD students at CSE and the final competition is the culmination of a process that narrows a field of entrants to a handful of finalists.

The new technique automatically constructs policies for applications that keep them from compromising other programs.

Censored Planet is releasing technical details for other researchers and for activists.

The award, named for a U-M alum, is a preeminent honor in the field of operating systems.

The awards were distributed to 18 different primary investigators.

Expert advice for voting in an unprecedented election.

The award recognizes early career faculty who show great promise in developing future computing technologies.

The new fellowship program was designed to study the effects of connected products and services.

New real-time employer dashboards provide “live-feed of data” as employees report their symptoms while also safeguarding users’ data privacy.

Prof. Roya Ensafi and PhD candidate Reethika Ramesh led organizing efforts for USENIX’s Tenth Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet.

Ironpatch could head off growing danger of security vulnerabilities in vehicle systems.

A new system called Leap earned a Best Paper award at USENIX ATC ‘20 for producing remote memory access speed on par with local machines over data center networks.

Kasikci will sift through the byproducts of hundreds of millions of common program executions to determine how this data can automate some key steps in bug finding and fixing.

The two organizations will connect their membership and partner networks to work on advancing security for life-saving devices.

Their findings reduce average job completion time by up to 95% when the system load is high, while treating every job fairly.

The approaches to energy adaptation he proposed are now commonplace, and the applications he analyzed (web browsers, voice recognition, video players, and maps) are still ubiquitous.

Public policy and engineering team up to improve food access.

“I don’t think any of us expected a global pandemic at the end of our senior year, let alone being able to work on an application that helps address it.”

The system targets software that runs using concurrent execution, a widespread method for boosting performance, and proves whether a program will output what it’s supposed to.

The upcoming presidential election in the middle of a pandemic has jurisdictions exploring new technologies. They’re not secure.

The web tools will help state officials identify potential hotspots as they reopen Michigan to business.

The projects impact voting systems, physical sensors, integrated circuit fabrication, and multiple microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities.

“My research has the potential to democratize programming and make it possible for millions of people around the globe to automate otherwise tedious tasks using programming.”

Weimer is well known as a passionate educator, and for going the extra mile to engage with and advocate for students.

Researchers are working with the city on two key initiatives to address food availability for elderly and low-income populations.

The team will build high-quality datasets to enable automatic quality checking and fraud detection of the new coronavirus data.

The nine students represent a broad range of research areas in the department.

The student’s project targets critical moments where the next instruction in a program is only available in a slower type of memory.

The analytical model, called Accelerometer, can be applied in the early stages of an accelerator’s design to predict its effectiveness before ever being installed.

Subarno Banerjee uses program analysis to improve software systems’ safety and security.

Goel designs algorithms that can automatically demonstrate the correctness of hardware systems.

The team will use fMRI to identify some of the underlying processes that occur when a code reviewer weighs in on a piece of software and its author.

Most programs in use today have to be completely rewritten at a very low level to reap the benefits of hardware acceleration. This system demonstrates how to make that translation automatic.

How changing the rules of computing could lighten Big Data’s impact on the internet.

Vehicles that perceive obstacles that aren’t really there could cause traffic accidents.

The team says their framework can scalably and semi-automatically monitor the use of filtering technologies for censorship at global scale.

The team will develop a secure, data-intensive network solution to effectively transport extremely high volumes of research data on and off campus.

Akshitha Sriraman works to enable hyperscale computing on high-demand web services.

Researchers carried out the first study on voter behavior with electronic assistive devices, found 93% missed incorrect ballots.

The three students were given Honorable Mentions for their interdisciplinary projects.

This round of funding strongly encourages pioneering work with the potential for major expansion.

Koutra specializes in advancing network methods to speed up a variety of big data applications.

The CSE faculty include Prof. David Fouhey, Prof. Danai Koutra, Prof. Rada Mihalcea, and Research Scientist Veronica Perez-Rosas.

Comparing graphs the team’s tool is up to an order of magnitude faster than competitive baselines.

The open-source system cuts a key step in chip testing down from days or weeks to a couple hours, on average.

The proposal provides a chip-level safeguard against sensitive data being transmitted after it’s accessed.

A Q&A with J. Alex Halderman, who co-founded the nonprofit organization.

The nation is using inexpensive commodity equipment to block 170K domains on more than 1K privately-owned ISPs.

The newly discovered microphone vulnerability allows attackers to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants using light.

Prof Jagadish is an internationally recognized expert in the field of very large databases.

The new system is designed to save security researchers time and effort spent reverse-engineering the message format of every vehicle they study.

Technology pioneered by Michigan researchers can circumvent many effective website blocking tools

The workshop brings together outstanding women interested in pursuing academic careers in electrical engineering and computer science.

Researchers designed three new systems to speed up code at several key bottlenecks.

The team’s new tool will combine of software and data to make gathering structured data dramatically easier.

The new additions to the department offer a breadth of research and educational experience, with projects spanning robotic interaction and the future of programming languages.

Up to this point, no attacks had been discovered targeting a car’s LiDAR system—but a major new finding from researchers at the University of Michigan has demonstrated what that might look like.

Using real-time fMRI readings, researchers linked spatial reasoning with CS problem solving.

Erie provided database repairs that were previously performed exclusively by human programmers.

The research generated a chatbot to help users sift through important details in privacy policies.

The research suggests that common blacklist-based prevention systems are ineffective.

Top Picks is an annual special edition of IEEE Micro magazine that acknowledges the 10-12 most significant research papers.

This is the fifth time that Prof. Chen has been named Professor of the Year by EECS students.

Chen’s dissertation research was dedicated to developing proactive defense approaches to the new security challenges of a hyper-connected world.

Edge Fabric offers providers real-time performance analysis and a way to incorporate this data into routing decisions.

Chowdhury’s work has produced important results that can make memory in data centers both cheaper and more efficient.

Halderman will work to further educate lawmakers, future cybersecurity experts, and the public about how to ensure that election results can relied upon and verified

The meeting began the commission’s review and assessment of election security in Michigan.

The effort seeks to protect the integrity of every vote.

Chowdhury connects all unused memory in a data cluster and treats it as a single unit.

Chowdhury’s lab multiplied the number of jobs a GPU cluster can finish in a set amount of time

In congressional testimony, professor urges $370M in federal funding to replace outdated machines.

Graphs that are customized, stored locally, and able to change over time can enable faster and more accurate searching and digital assistants

Kasikci presents a method to improve a program’s ability to use data in a straightforward, efficient way

Ten years ago, Prof. Westley Weimer set out to shave off time and expenditure sunk into patch fixes.

“Thanks to his tireless support and unparalleled patience, I am now equipped with a fundamental research skill set.”

McDonald works to develop better privacy and security tools for marginalized communities

Censored Planet could provide new insight into the flow of online information

Jagadish will help lead MIDAS into its next stage and further expand data science efforts across disciplines.

Michigan Engineering researchers led by Prof. Pinaki Mazumder have created a new chip interconnect technology using terahertz surface-wave interconnects that will enable ultra fast data transmissions.

SkyCore is a complete software solution to deploying mobile networks on unmanned drones

A team of researchers unearthed new data on geographic denial of access to web content in a new paper.

A new special topics course on election cybersecurity gives students an examination of the past, present, and future of US elections.

Researchers have implemented a new way to diagnose software failures with a high degree of accuracy and efficiency.

“The work is an important step towards understanding how to make tradeoffs between usability and security.”

Patches can provide protection.

Foofah is a tool that can help to minimize the effort and required background knowledge needed to clean up data.

Jie Song devised a method to combine summarized datasets that group information by incompatible units.

Ozay is one of four U-M faculty members selected to receive a Henry Russel Award for 2019. The Award is one of the university’s highest honors for junior faculty members.

When it comes to their smartphones, immigrants struggle to apply instinctive caution, according to a study by a team of University of Michigan researchers.

This award is given to the VLDB paper published ten years earlier that has had the most influence since its publication.

The day when cars can talk to each other – and to traffic lights, stop signs, guardrails and even pavement markings – is rapidly approaching.

A new approach recreates the power of a large server by linking up and pooling the resources of smaller computers with fast networking technology.

U-M profs weigh new business model, European-style regulation

Profs. Jia Deng, Roya Ensafi, and Manos Kapritsos have been selected to receive Google Faculty Research Awards.

Professor Alex Halderman and the New York Times staged a mock election to demonstrate voting machine vulnerability.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate a new intelligent traffic control algorithm and cause severe traffic jams.

In this video, CSE PhD Student Matt Bernhard weighs in on the matter Facebook data harvesting, such as that done by Cambridge Analytica.

Automated chatbot uses artificial intelligence to weed through fine print

The researchers, including Prof. Harsha Madhyastha and CSE graduate students Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk and Muhammed Uluyol, received prize for their paper, “Vroom: Accelerating the Mobile Web with Server-Aided Dependency Resolution.”

Censys is the first commercially available internet-wide scanning tool. It helps IT experts to secure large networks with a constantly changing array of devices.

A long-standing tenet of the internet was overturned today.

How much can your cellphone reveal about where you go?

On Dec. 14, the FCC will vote on the rules that today ensure internet service providers treat all web content equally.

Professors H. V. Jagadish and Christopher Poulsen are honored for advancing socially impactful research.

Their paper introduces a new programming language and tool called Vale that supports flexible, automated verification of high-performance assembly code.

Verdict can make databases deliver answers more than 200 times faster while maintaining 99 percent accuracy.

New Vroom software could double its speed.

His remarks focused on vulnerabilities in the US voting system and a policy agenda for securing the system against the threat of hacking.

The gift supplemented the Computer Science and Engineering Special Projects Fund.

New software finally makes ‘memory disaggregation’ practical.

On the faculty since 1998, Noble was most recently associate dean for undergraduate education.

‘Open port’ backdoors are common.

Jack has enjoyed involvement in research across diverse domains within the College of Engineering.

Researchers have for the first time characterized a widespread vulnerability in the software that runs on mobile devices.

Chen investigates how to develop defense approaches that can fundamentally address security challenges in existing and future smart systems.

Prof. Mozafari is passionate about building large-scale data-intensive systems that are more scalable, more robust, and more predictable.

Prof. Madhyastha seeks to enable the cloud provider to monitor traffic on behalf of all the web services hosted on its platform.

Andrew’s research creates cluster-scale systems that allow developers to quickly understand and debug programs.

Andrew’s research creates cluster-scale systems that allow developers to quickly understand and debug programs.

Prof. Mao has led inquiries into issues of Internet routing, measurement and security, wide-area and enterprise network management, malware behavior analysis and host-based security in general.

Prof. Flinn has been an active researcher in the field of mobile computing for a number of years.

Prof. Madhyastha’s recent research has focused on enabling latency-sensitive web services to optimize user experience.

The USENIX Test of Time Awards recognizes papers presented at its respective conference from at least 10 years ago that have had a lasting impact on their fields.

Still, it’s not guaranteed, as seen in Amazon’s same-day delivery service. Algorithm designers may not even realize a problem has crept in.

DROWN allows attackers to break encryption used to protect HTTPS websites and read or steal sensitive communications.

In order to bring HTTPS to everyone, Prof. Halderman joined forces in 2012 with colleagues at Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to found Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit certificate authority with the mission of making the switch to HTTPS vastly easier.

The Big Data Summer Bootcamp is a six-week interdisciplinary training and research program at the University of Michigan.

The annual SIGKDD doctoral dissertation award recognizes excellent research by doctoral candidates in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery.

One of the paper describes and demonstrates a malicious hardware backdoor. The other demonstrated security failings in a commercial smart home platform.

Klotski seeks to improve users’ perceptions of how quickly a page loads by maximizing the amount of important content on the page that is fetched and displayed within the user’s attention span.

Prof. Chowdhury bridges the gap between application-level performance and network-level optimizations through the coflow abstraction.

New security ramifications exist when laptops and smartphones configured for enterprise systems are used outside the enterprise in the realm of the wider web.

Not all online traffic is the same; should we treat it the same anyway?

New software developed by CSE engineers and inspired, in part, by a Batman movie, could give any smartphone the capacity to sense force or pressure on its screen or body.

New vulnerabilities form when hardware like electronic locks, thermostats, ovens, sprinklers, lights and motion sensors are networked and set up to be controlled remotely.

He has built software systems for information extraction, database integration, and feature engineering and applied these to problems in the social sciences.

The project aims to create a new software stack for analytics over geo-distributed datasets.

Prof. Mozafari is passionate about building large-scale data-intensive systems that are more scalable, more robust, and more predictable.

Let’s Encrypt allows anyone to request a free website security certificate without needing an invitation.

The professorship is awarded to junior faculty members in recognition of outstanding contributions to teaching and research.

The software enables users to ask questions about the hosts and networks that compose the Internet and get an immediate reply.

In their paper, the researchers present the first report on global adoption rates of SMTP email security extensions.

Such tactics, even if effective in reducing crime, raise civil liberty concerns.

Diffie-Hellman is a popular algorithm used for encrypted communications, including emails VPNs, HTTPS, and other protocols where a client and server negotiate a shared secret key for communication

Halderman has met significant contributions in the areas of electronic voting security, internet security, and electronic censorship resistance.

The paper was published at the 2002 Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation.

This project strives to positively impact the availability and reliability of the Internet and provide the security community with tools, platforms, and comprehensive vulnerability measurement data.

Prof. Flinn joined the department in 2002 as an assistant professor.

The focal point of the project will be a new computing resource, called ConFlux, which is designed to enable supercomputer simulations to interface with large datasets while running.

It describes their work in measuring important network phenomena for debugging problems at the edge of a cellular network.

In an unusual turn of events, we’ve tied with ourselves for this one.

Securing Internet voting requires solving some of the hardest problems in computer security, and even the smallest mistakes can undermine the integrity of the election result.

Mao’s goal was to create a diagnosis tool to achieve responsive and energy-efficient mobile apps that work well in diverse network conditions.

Prof. Halderman’s research interests span software security, network security, data privacy, anonymity, electronic voting, censorship resistance, digital rights management, computer forensics, ethics, and cybercrime, as well as the interaction of technology with law, governmental regulation, and international affairs.

Congratulations to the following CSE Faculty recipients of 2014-15 College of Engineering Awards.

A project is underway which will offer a free, automated, and easy process for converting webservers from HTTP to HTTPS that is implemented with a single command.

The research team performed a comprehensive, measurement-based analysis of the impact of the recent Heartbleed vulnerability.

A weakness believed to exist in Android, Windows and iOS operating systems could be used to obtain personal information from unsuspecting users, research at the University of Michigan has shown.

Congratulations to Profs Bertacco, Flinn, Narayanasamy, Olson, Rais-Zadeh, and Zhong.