A Short Time Ago in the Messaging of Children\u27s Media Very Close By

Most children in the US grow up watching television that tries to teach them some kind of life lesson that they should carry with them as they grow up. The children’s show, Star Wars Rebels, does something similar but goes a step further to handle topics that would be considered more mature, such as the imperialistic nature of empires. The project looks at what the implications of such messages are. With an overview of studies that show how well children understand what they\u27re watching and an examination of why the themes in this show are overlooked, the project seeks to prove that Rebels can show children how the past and present empirical behavior of the US has caused so much harm. In order to create a better future, they must learn from the country’s past mistakes and reshape it to become a place that is truly free and safe for all

Virtual Container Attestation: Customized trusted containers for on-demand computing.

In today\u27s computing environment, data is moving to central locations and most computers are merely used to access the data. Today is the era of cloud computing and distributed computing, where users have control over neither data nor computation. As this trend continues there is an increasing frequency of mutually distrustful parties being forced to interact and share resources with each other in potentially dangerous situations. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a means of creating trust between two entities, or at the very least providing some means of determining the trust level of a given machine. Current approaches to the trust problem focus on various forms of isolation and attestation, but most have high overheads or are overly rigid in their requirements to users. I propose and implement an alternative solution which provides flexible, on-demand containers for untrusted applications, and enforcement of requested security properties. Together these provide assurance to the remote parties that the machines behave as required or are quickly shut down

TwoKind Authentication: Protecting Private Information in Untrustworthy Environments (Extended Version)

We propose and evaluate TwoKind Authentication, a simple and effective technique that allows users to limit access to their private information in untrustworthy environments. Users often log in to Internet sites from insecure computers, and more recently have started divulging their email passwords to social-networking sites, thereby putting their private communications at risk. To mitigate this problem, we explore the use of multiple authenticators for the same account that are associated with specific sets of privileges. In its simplest form, TwoKind features two modes of authentication, a low and a high authenticator. By using a low authenticator, users can signal to the server they are in an untrusted environment, following which the server restricts the user\u27s actions, including access to private data. In this paper, we seek to evaluate the effectiveness of multiple authenticators in promoting safer behavior in users. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through a user experiment --- we find that users make a distinction between the two authenticators and generally behave in a security-conscientious way, protecting their high authenticator a majority of the time. Our study suggests that TwoKind will be beneficial to several Internet applications, particularly if the privileges can be customized to a user\u27s security preferences

I/O Is Faster Than the CPU - Let's Partition Resources and Eliminate (Most) OS Abstractions

Peer reviewe

Trusted Virtual Containers on Demand

TPM-based trusted computing aspires to use hardware and cryptography to provide a remote relying party with assurances about the trustworthiness of a computing environment. However, standard approaches to trusted computing are hampered in the areas of scalability, expressiveness, and flexibility. This paper reports on our research project to address these limitations by using TPMs inside OpenSolaris: our kernel creates lightweight containers on demand, and uses DTrace and other tools to extend attestation to more nuanced runtime properties. We illustrate this work with prototype application scenarios from cyber infrastructure operating the U.S. power grid

Virtual Container Attestation: Customized Trusted Containers for On-Demand Computing

In today’s computing environment, data is moving to central locations and most computers are merely used to access the data. Today is the era of cloud computing and distributed computing, where users have control over neither data nor computation. As this trend continues there is an increasing frequency of mutually distrustful parties being forced to interact and share resources with each other in potentially dangerous situations. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a means of creating trust between two entities, or at the very least providing some means of determining the trust level of a given machine. Current approaches to the trust problem focus on various forms of isolation and attestation, but most have high overheads or are overly rigid in their requirements to users. I propose and implement an alternative solution which provides flexible, on-demand containers for untrusted applications, and enforcement of requested security properties. Together these provide assurance to the remote parties that the machines behave as required or ar