2011-2012 Annual Report of the Honors College

The 2011 – 2012 year marks the 30th year of Honors Programming being on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. First envisioned by the Dr. Hebert Lasky in 1982, the Undergraduate Honors Program was … designed to attract, stimulate, and retain talented students. The students will improve the learning climate at the University, in part because much of their course work will be in regular University courses. In addition, the Honors Program will set an example of academic excellence. ‐ Program proposal present to the Council on Academic Affairs, 8 October 1981. In the ensuing 30 years, the program has been all that was proposed of it, and more

Distributed IoT Attestation via Blockchain (Extended Version)

The growing number and nature of Internet of Things (IoT) devices makes these resource-constrained appliances particularly vulnerable and increasingly impactful in their exploitation. Current estimates for the number of connected things commonly reach the tens of billions. The low-cost and limited computational strength of these devices can preclude security features. Additionally, economic forces and a lack of industry expertise in security often contribute to a rush to market with minimal consideration for security implications. It is essential that users of these emerging technologies, from consumers to IT professionals, be able to establish and retain trust in the multitude of diverse and pervasive compute devices that are ever more responsible for our critical infrastructure and personal information. Remote attestation is a well-known technique for building such trust between devices. In standard implementations, a potentially untrustworthy prover attests, using public key infrastructure, to a verifier about its configuration or properties of its current state. Attestation is often performed on an ad hoc basis with little concern for historicity. However, controls and sensors manufactured for the Industrial IoT (IIoT) may be expected to operate for decades. Even in the consumer market, so-called smart things can be expected to outlive their manufacturers. This longevity combined with limited software or firmware patching creates an ideal environment for long-lived zero-day vulnerabilities. Knowing both if a device is vulnerable and if so when it became vulnerable is a management nightmare as IoT deployments scale. For network connected machines, with access to sensitive information and real-world physical controls, maintaining some sense of a device\u27s lifecycle would be insightful. In this paper, we propose a novel attestation architecture, DAN: a distributed attestation network, utilizing blockchain to store and share device information. We present the design of this new attestation architecture, and describe a virtualized simulation, as well as a prototype system chosen to emulate an IoT deployment with a network of Raspberry Pi, Infineon TPMs, and a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. We discuss the implications and potential challenges of such a network for various applications such as identity management, intrusion detection, forensic audits, and regulatory certification

The Problem of English Evangelicals and Homosexuality: A Girardian Study of Popular English Evangelical Writings on Homosexuality 1960-2010

English evangelicals in the period 1960-2010 have been marked by their negativity and violence towards gays. However, they have also consistently condemned homophobia during this period (and often seemed unaware of their own complicity in it). This thesis draws on the work of René Girard to analyse popular English evangelical writings and the ways in which they have implicitly encouraged violence against gays even whilst explicitly condemning it. This analysis of evangelical writings on homosexuality is placed in its historical context by drawing on the work of relevant historians and social scientists. It is further contextualised by reference to an analysis of evangelical writings on holiness during the same period. The thesis argues that English evangelical violence towards gays is a byproduct of internal conflicts within English evangelicalism. Gays are seen as prototypical liberals and treated as scapegoats for an evangelical identity crisis. Homophobia and fundamentalism are discussed and rejected as alternative explanations. It is argued that the crisis in English evangelicalism in the period 1960-2010 has had a distorting effect not only on approaches to homosexuality, but also to other areas of English evangelical spirituality. Finally, evangelical atonement theology is examined, and found to contain both elements that legitimise sacred violence and resources to help evangelicals resist it

Applying formal verification to microkernel IPC at meta

We use Iris, an implementation of concurrent separation logic in the Coq proof assistant, to verify two queue data structures used for inter-process communication in an operating system under development. Our motivations are twofold. First, we wish to leverage formal verification to boost confidence in a delicate piece of industrial code that was subject to numerous revisions. Second, we aim to gain information on the cost-benefit tradeoff of applying a state-of-the-art formal verification tool in our industrial setting. On both fronts, our endeavor has been a success. The verification effort proved that the queue algorithms are correct and uncovered four algorithmic simplifications as well as bugs in client code. The simplifications involve the removal of two memory barriers, one atomic load, and one boolean check, all in a performance-sensitive part of the OS. Removing the redundant boolean check revealed unintended uses of uninitialized memory in multiple device drivers, which were fixed. The proof work was completed in person months, not years, by engineers with no prior familiarity with Iris. These findings are spurring further use of verification at Meta

A survey of network virtualization

a b s t r a c t Due to the existence of multiple stakeholders with conflicting goals and policies, alterations to the existing Internet architecture are now limited to simple incremental updates; deployment of any new, radically different technology is next to impossible. To fend off this ossification, network virtualization has been propounded as a diversifying attribute of the future inter-networking paradigm. By introducing a plurality of heterogeneous network architectures cohabiting on a shared physical substrate, network virtualization promotes innovations and diversified applications. In this paper, we survey the existing technologies and a wide array of past and state-of-the-art projects on network virtualization followed by a discussion of major challenges in this area