[Colloq] Reminder: PhD Thesis Proposal - Ruopeng Ye, Wednesday, March 28, 3:40pm

[Rachel Kalweit]

PhD Thesis Proposal by:
Ruopeng Ye

Proposal Title:
Authenticated Software Update

Wednesday, March 28, 2007
3:40pm
366 West Village H

Abstract:

Software update is the process of updating software running on the
computing devices. It makes it possible to download and install software
packages and patches to the devices in real time. This is an important
feature for managing computing devices in a distributed network, as it
saves the trouble of recalling devices back to the manufacturers, or
sending field engineers to remote locations to maintain the devices.

Without authentication protection, software update can be used to
distribute virus and other malicious programs. Previous approaches to
software update either has no authentication protection at all, or use
conventional digital signatures, which is inefficient for authenticating
partial updates. In this proposal, we study the problem of, 1) how to
distribute software updates to devices, so that the devices can
efficiently authenticate the data that is received; and 2) how to
restrict the devices to run only the authenticated software that are
authorized for the device.

We design an on-the-fly signature generation scheme, for the server to
reduce the signature generation time. Two new fingerprint algorithms are
devised, which are especially efficient for calculating checksum for
partial updates, our fingerprint update cost is proportional to the size
of the data that is modified. We propose a client-server authenticated
software update system that uses the signature generation scheme we
design, in which the device authenticate the software before it runs them.

In this proposal, we define the problem, present preliminary results
obtained so far and discuss future research work.

Committee:

Prof. Agnes Chan, Advisor
Prof. Guevara Noubir
Prof. Rajmohan Rajaraman
Prof. Ravi Sundaram
Dr. Lily Chen, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)


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