This year, the conference will feature the following keynote lectures:

• Efficient Signature Matching with Extended Automata,
  Somesh Jha, University of Wisconsin
• Basant Rajan, Symantec (India)
• Computing on Encrypted Data,
  Amit Sahai, University of California at Los Angeles
• BitBlaze: Binary-Analysis for Computer Security,
  Dawn Song, University of California at Berkeley

Automata-based representations and related algorithms have been applied to address several problems in information security, and often the automata had to be augmented with additional information. For example, extended finite-state automata (EFSA) augment finite-state automata (FSA) with variables to track dependencies between arguments of system calls. In this paper, we introduce extended finite automata (XFAs) which augment FSAs with finite scratch memory and instructions to manipulate this memory. We also present algorithms to manipulate XFAs. Our primary motivation for introducing XFAs is signature matching in Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). Representing NIDS signatures as deterministic finite-state automata (DFAs) results in very fast signature matching but for several classes of signatures DFAs can blowup in space. Using nondeterministic finite-state automata (NFA) to represent NIDS signatures results in a succinct representation but at the expense of higher time complexity for signature matching. In other words, DFAs are time-efficient but space-inefficient, and NFAs are space-efficient but time-inefficient. In our experiments we have noticed that for a large class of NIDS signatures XFAs have time complexity similar to DFAs and space complexity similar to NFAs. For our test set, XFAs use 10 times less memory than a DFA-based solution, yet achieve 20 times higher matching speeds.

Somesh Jha received his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. Currently, Somesh Jha is an Associate Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). His work focuses on analysis of security protocols, survivability analysis, intrusion detection, formal methods for security, and analyzing malicious code. Recently he has also worked on privacy-preserving protocols. Somesh Jha has published over 90 articles in highly-refereed conferences and prominent journals. He has won numerous best-paper awards. Somesh also received the NSF career award.

Basant Rajan is the Chief Technology Officer of Symantec Corporation (India), and provides leadership for innovation and strategic vision. Prior to this role, Basant was Director Development for the Storage Foundations group. In this role, he monitored functional areas like spanning design, development, quality assurance, sustenance, escalations, performance and certification and he added a team of 350 people. Basant has filed 12 patents during his stint at Symantec. He joined VERITAS Software (India) Pvt. Ltd. in Oct 1997 as a senior developer in the File Systems group. Concurrently, he held the post of Visiting Member at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (T.I.F.R.), Bombay (until Feb 2006), working on research/technology projects. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Permanent Way Engineers, Malaysian Chapter. (1993). He holds a doctorate from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, India. He completed his thesis in Programming Languages: Specification & Design of Multiple-Clocked Systems. Basant has completed his B. Tech. in computer science from the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, India in 1990. His interests include Storage technology, parallel processing, distributed systems, real-time systems, scheduling, formal languages and logic.

Encryption secures our stored data but seems to make it inert. Can we process encrypted data without having to decrypt it first? Answers to this fundamental question give rise to a wide variety of applications. In this talk, we explore this question in a number of settings, focusing on how interaction and secure hardware can help us compute on encrypted data, and what can be done if we have neither interaction nor secure hardware at our disposal.

Professor Amit Sahai received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. From 2000 to 2004, he was a professor at Princeton University; in 2004 he joined UCLA as an Associate Professor of Computer Science, and as Associate Director of the Center for Information and Computation Security. His research interests are in security and cryptography, and theoretical computer science more broadly. He has published more than 70 original technical research papers at venues such as the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), CRYPTO, and the Journal of the ACM. He has given a number of invited talks at institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, including the 2004 Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at NTT Labs, Japan. Professor Sahai is the recipient of numerous honors; he was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2002, and received an Okawa Research Award in 2007. His research has been covered by several news agencies including the BBC World Service.

Binary analysis is important for computer security because source code is often unavailable and binary analysis provides the ground truth about program behavior since computers execute binaries (executables) directly, not source code. In this talk, I will present the BitBlaze project, a binary-centric approach to computer security: how we can address a wide-spectrum of different security problems by analyzing program binaries and automatically extracting security related properties from them. I will describe the two main research foci and our recent results of the BitBlaze project: (1) the design and development of the underlying BitBlaze Binary Analysis Platform, and (2) applying the BitBlaze Binary Analysis Platform to addressing real-world security problems. The BitBlaze Binary Analysis Platform is a novel fusion of static and dynamic binary analysis as well as formal analysis techniques, including a new symbolic, fine-grained, whole system analysis. Using the BitBlaze Binary Analysis Platform, we have enabled new solutions to over a dozen different security problems including in-depth malware analysis, vulnerability discovery, diagnosis, and defense, patch-based exploit generation, and reverse engineering of protocol formats. More information about BitBlaze is available at http://bitblaze.cs.berkeley.edu.

Dawn Song is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2002). Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy from 2002 to 2007. Her research interest lies in security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks. She is the author of more than 60 research papers in areas ranging from software security, networking security, database security, distributed systems security, to applied cryptography. She is the recipient of various awards and grants including the NSF CAREER Award, the IBM Faculty Award, the George Tallman Ladd Research Award, the Sloan Award, and the Best Paper Award in USENIX Security Symposium.