imchris.org

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

The spring semester is over, and I’ve learned some new things. What I learned in privacy class was that privacy enhancing technologies are complicated, and often can’t offer any official assurance. In advanced coding theory class I learned a whole new set of analysis techniques, and understand better what makes up the modern coding schemes.

• Aimstalker (privacy project) – data-mining the aim network
• Coding Theory and Sudoku (coding theory project) – modifying the Sudoku puzzle problem to create LDPC codes, and constructing Sudoku puzzles with random checks.

Finally, I’ll be in Berkeley, CA all summer working at ICIR.

ECE 559 – Advanced Coding Theory and ECE 598 – Privacy Enhancing Techniques. Both courses have good professors (Ralf Koetter and Nikita Borisov). Also enrolled in the Security Reading Seminar, which is pretty much the same as the fall one, although this semester we have to read other people’s qualifying exam papers and focus on “dependability”.

Also continuing to do research, and be part of SIGMIL.