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Michael Franz (Irvine), Cyber Attacks and Defenses: Trends, Challenges, and Outlook

Abstract: A cyber attacker needs to find only one way in, while defenders need to guard a lot of ground. Adversaries can fully debug and perfect their attacks on their own computers, exactly replicating the environment that they will later be targeting. This is the situation today, which has been exacerbated by an increasing trend towards a software "monoculture," in which there are only two major desktop operating systems, two major phone operating systems, one major office software suite, and so on. One possible defense is based on making the targets more dissimilar from each other, which raises the cost to attackers since they need to adapt their attack to each specific target. An alternative defense is based on creating a model of what a "correct" program does, and enforcing that model at run-time. I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches and their evolution over the past two decades. Unfortunately, attackers are evolving too, resulting in a "cat and mouse" situation in which defenses are almost always reactive to attacks that have already been observed. I will discuss my vision of how to get ahead of the attackers, and close by stating why, in spite of the bleak situation today, I am confident that we will eventually be able to stop most kinds of low-level cyber attacks completely.

Ort: Takustraße 9, Seminarrraum 049

25.04.2025 | 14:15 c.t.