Speaker: Professor Ruby B. Lee

Abstract: Cloud computing provides computing resources to cloud customers on demand. It should also be able to provide different types and levels of security on demand, at different costs to the customers. But how does the customer know that he is getting the security services he paid for? Towards this end, a cloud provider needs to be able to monitor a server’s security health and see if this matches the security properties the customer requested. We defined CloudMonatt, an architecture that does this monitoring and attestation of security health. We discuss what security mechanisms are needed in each compute server and in the property-attestation server, how some security health properties can be inferred, and how scalable secure monitoring and property attestation can be achieved. What measurements can be easily collected from which security health properties can be inferred? Can existing performance monitoring or optimization features be used? Beyond the architectural framework, we would like to invite exploration of how machine learning can be used effectively to help determine various aspects of security health. Can these techniques also be used to detect security health in smartphones?

Speaker’s Bio: Ruby B. Lee is the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at Princeton University. Her research in security-aware computer architecture includes secure processors enabling fine-grained secure enclaves, secure caches resilient to side-channel attacks, software-hardware architectures for self-protecting data, cloud computing security, smart phone security and security verification. Prior to Princeton, Lee served as chief architect at Hewlett-Packard, contributing to numerous technical innovations in processor architecture, multimedia architecture and security architecture. She was a founding architect of HP’s PA-RISC architecture and instrumental in the initial design of several generations of PA-RISC processors for HP’s business and technical computers. She helped catalyze the widespread adoption of multimedia in commodity computers by pioneering subword-parallelism (SIMD) for multimedia acceleration in microprocessors, now supported in all major Instruction Set Architectures. She led the introduction of the first multimedia user interface in low-end products. She also co-led the 64-bit Intel-HP multimedia architecture team, and helped introduce SIMD and novel permutation instructions into Intel processors. Lee is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, and holds over 120 U.S. and international patents. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell in the college scholar program and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Lee is a visiting professor at Imperial College.