UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO - STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
	The Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Security and Dependability Research

SURANJAN PRAMANIK

Ph.D. CANDIDATE

RESEARCH

• Adaptive End-to-End Dependability for Generic Applications in Networked Environment:

  PhD Dissertation Proposal
  In today's computing environment, both random failures and malicious attacks are considered major obstacles to the proper functioning of online servers. They contribute heavily to wastage of computation time, unavailability of services, leakage of confidential information, etc., resulting in substantial loss of resource and reputation for organizations. The traditional approach to fault-tolerance is replication and voting, and while fault-tolerance matches very closely with issues of system survivability and network security in a distributed system, simple replication doesn't necessarily help security since it is very easy to defeat an entire system if one of the replicas is compromised. Yet, redundancy is a must whether we consider security or dependability, since redundancy is the primary method known for improving the survivability of security services. This leads us to a challenging problem where redundancy must be used in a strategic way if both security and dependability need to be addressed. This project explores the effect of merging fault-tolerance and security in a general purpose distributed system using the idea of redundant execution of selective parts of an application.
  
  

  Publications

  
  
  • Suranjan Pramanik and Shambhu Upadhyaya. Improving Program Performance and Dependability Using Dynamic Binary Translation. in preparation for journal publication.
  • Shambhu Upadhyaya and Suranjan Pramanik. A New Architectural Approach for Self-Verification and Fault-Tolerance of Enterprise Servers, In 15th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems (PDCS), 2002.
  • Suranjan Pramanik and Shambhu Upadhyaya. VPSS: A Verifiable Proactive Secret Sharing Scheme in Distributed Systems. In Proceedings of Milcom, 2003.
  • Suranjan Pramanik and Shambhu Upadhyaya. RABIT: A New Framework for Runtime Emulation and Binary Translation. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Simulation Symposium, 2004.
  • Ramkumar Chinchani, Suranjan Pramanik and Ashish Garg, Handling Failures and DOS Attacks Using Network Device Groups, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo - The State University of New York, CSE-TR 2003-09, July 15, 2003. - Also accepted as fast Abstract in IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), Denver, Colorado, Nov 17-20, 2003.



• Document Control and Insider Threat:

  
  The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive document control and management system through several innovative schemes for secure access, on-line monitoring and support for log-based forensics. The uniqueness of our approach is the security consideration throughout the life cycle of a document, viz., pre-document access phase, mid-document access phase and post-document access phase. The expected outcomes of our research are: accurate modeling and mitigation of insider threat, protection against subversion/circumvention of the monitoring mechanism itself and post-attack trace-back for attack identification as applicable to the realm of document control.

  Publications

  
  
  • S. Pramanik, S. Vidyaraman, and S. Upadhyaya. Security Policies to Mitigate Insider Threat in the Document Control Domain. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), December 2004.
  • A. Garg, S. Pramanik, V. Sankaranarayanan, and S. Upadhyaya. Dynamic Document Reclassification for Preventing Insider Abuse. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual IEEE Information Assurance Workshop, West Point, NY, June 2004.
  • Vidyaraman Sankaranarayanan, Suranjan Pramanik, and Shambhu Upadhyaya, ``Detecting Document Compromises by Masquerading Insiders,'' to appear in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2006.
  • Suranjan Pramanik, Duc Ha, Hung Ngo, and Shambhu Upadhyaya, ``Key Challenge Graph for Modeling Insiders and Threat Assessment,'' submitted to IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2006.

Research Group Affiliations



• SPIDER Research Group
• Center of Excellence in Information Systems Assurance Research and Education

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