ECE Alumnus Farid Molazem (former ECE PhD Student) and Professor Dr. Karthik Pattabiraman have received the ACM TECS Best Paper Award 2020 for their paper titled “Design-Level and Code-Level Security Analysis of IoT Devices”. The award recognizes the best paper published in the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing between January 2018 and December 2019. ACM TECS aims to present the leading work relating to the analysis, design, behaviour, and experience with embedded computing systems and is considered the top journal in the embedded computing area. Dr. Farid Molazem is now a software engineer at Google.
ECE Alumnus Farid Molazem (former ECE PhD Student) and Professor Dr. Karthik Pattabiraman have received the ACM TECS Best Paper Award 2020 for their paper titled “Design-Level and Code-Level Security Analysis of IoT Devices”. The award recognizes the best paper published in the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing between January 2018 and December 2019. ACM TECS aims to present the leading work relating to the analysis, design, behavior, and experience with embedded computing systems, and is considered the top journal in the embedded computing area. Dr. Farid Molazem is now a software engineer at Google.
The paper analyzes the important role the Internet of Things (IoT) plays in different aspects of our lives. Smart grids, smart cars, and medical devices all incorporate IoT devices as key components. The ubiquity and criticality of these devices make them an attractive target for attackers. Therefore, techniques are needed to analyze their security, so that their potential vulnerabilities can be addressed. In this paper Dr. Molazem and Dr. Pattabiraman and introduce two techniques, one at the design-level, and the other at the code-level, to analyze security of IoT devices, and compare their effectiveness. The code-level analysis technique is able to find 3 times more attacks, and complete the analysis in half the time, compared to the design-level analysis technique, with no false positives. They demonstrate their techniques on a widely deployed IoT device, a smart electric meter, and find many real vulnerabilities in it. This work has led to significant interest from industry, and was featured by many news outlets last year (find out more here).
The award was presented virtually in the Embedded System Week (ESWEEK) 2020 on Wednesday, September 2020.
Congratulations Dr. Molazem and Dr. Pattabiraman!