imchris.org

During Thanksgiving break I went to Death Valley National Park. Flew into Las Vegas and drove to the park. It’s an amazing place. I started to write a short page about the different things I ended up doing and there’s pictures on my flicker feed. I joined the pro flickr club so they won’t be disappearing. The trip was pretty long though a lot of fun.

The rest of the fall semester is going to be working on another project, my thesis propsal and setting up prelims. I might even have to start interviewing for jobs.

Fall 08 started a quick and is already half over. I’ve been continuing my project from Microsoft Research, working with a security group there lead by Helen Wang and working on a couple other security projects at school. I’m almost done with the first part of the MSR project and we will be writing a paper soon. Until that’s written other projects are on hold.

It’s looking like I will be graduating sometime in the spring/summer of 2009 but nothing is final yet. I also want to get a little more research published before I get out of Urbana.

The Illinois Malicious Processor (IMP) project I worked on was written up by InfoWorld! Its a great read: Read it here – That is in addition to it being published at LEET and being awarded a Best Paper Award! The title is “Designing and Implementing Malicious Hardware” and its available online in HTML and PDF formats.

Sam, Shuo and I have had our paper accepted at the 2008 Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) conference this spring. Here’s the PDF.

It was also written up in the news! “Secure web browsing with the OP web browser”, was featured in an article on eWeek in an article titled “Is There Room for a Security Browser?” By Ryan Naraine and the. The eWeek article was also Slashdotted (slashdot).

I’m going to Microsoft Research for the summer after I present at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. I’ll be out in Redmond, WA at the end of May through August. I’m going to be doing some pretty interesting research this summer (and some implementation). Once my slides are done for Oakland they will be up here.

Christmas break was fun, I ended up going to New Hampshire’s White Mountains and staying at an AMC lodge. Did a lot of snowshoeing, survived a blizzard, and generally got to be in lots of snow. I’m looking forward to some camping this spring though I’m not sure where or when yet.

Spring semester started too, I’m taking a course called “Design of 4G WWANs and Their Building Blocks: Intelligent Routers”, its an ECE598 taught by Constantine Polychronopoulos. No other courses, just continuing the web browser research and trying to get going on some new ideas.

This fall is a little bit different than most semesters – no class. I decided that I could fill my time easily enough with research that I didn’t need any busy work from courses. I’m currently working on web related security research, including client security, finding web exploits, and figuring out what to do with all of the amazing malware online. Once we have finished some of the work we are doing I’ll have links to source and papers online.

I’ve also been forced to participate in TCIP. I won’t put up here what I think of that project, but lets just say that I’m not all that happy about it.

This semester produced a couple interesting things. First, a project which tries to detect malware (particularly rootkits) and runs outside the OS, in a virtual machine. Second, another paper written by me, this time on botnets and command and control networks which use peer-to-peer protocols (open source and custom). I’m also finally done with all my course work at school.

Summer plans include a little bit of vacation time, DEFCON, and research here at school.

ECE 598 – Secure Hardware taught by David Nicol and CS 598 – Hot topics in virtualization and security taught by Sam King. Both classes are primarily paper reading courses.

Trying to get lots of research done this spring. I really want to graduate and get out of Champaign-Urbana.

Taking: ECE 541 Computer Systems Analysis (Bill Sanders, David Nicol), CS 498 Program Optimization (Maria Garzaran), CS 498 Theoretical Foundations of Cryptography (Manoj Prabhakaran). Apparently intent of the crypto course is to never discuss a real cryptographic algorithm… My recommendation: take Math 595 with Iwan Duursma