Research Experience for Undergraduates 2014

Security is a vital part of today’s technology concerns. This is because of the growing issue about how secure our computing devices really are. In the past few years there have been many worries about information privacy to financial safekeeping. Mainly these concerns all try to solve the problem of security by better improving the software end of technology. However, todays hackers are more sophisticated cyber thefts that are not just attacking computers at the software level but also at the physical level.Israel worked a new idea on how to better protect a Read Only Memory Chip at the physical level from potential security threats of an attacker trying to steal important security keys, programs and data. This is usually done in a process where the attacker has to physically expose the chip’s internal layout by removing its cover. Therefore, in order to prevent this we have explored the idea of a chip that would be made sealed from air with magnesium interconnections that can be programmable for information to be stored on the chip. Magnesium was chosen because of its property to quickly oxidize when exposed to air. Hence, when the attacker tries to remove information from the chip it will oxidize and erase the information on it. In the paper we will discuss the benefits of this security method along with how magnesium affects the chips power consumption, resistance, delay and capacitance as well as other ways of better improving the security of a ROM chip on a circuit board.

Each individual possesses a unique set of character- istics and personality traits that are distinguishable from another individual. These traits, as we would expect, tend to influence our every day decisions. Current secondary user authentication methods either rely heavily on a user’s ability to remember key preferences, phrases, and events, or they involve providing authentication on multiple devices. They also operate under the assumption that only the correct user has knowledge of this information and access to the device which is being used to input the information. However, this unfortunately is not always the case as malicious attacks that compromise a user’s device or discover personal information about the user are becoming more sophisticated and increasing in number. Vika proposed an authentication method which uses a user’s personality characteristics to determine if he is truly who he is claiming to be. In particular, she proposed a way of quantifying a user’s traits by observing his selection of images. This method would not be as vulnerable to malicious attacks as current methods are because the method is based on psychological observations that can not be replicated by anyone other than the correct user. Even if the device is compromised and a malicious attacker can observe a user’s input he would not be able to replicate it because he is not that user. Using this method, a user would first log in normally to his account. He would then proceed through a series of slides where his only instruction is to click on an image on each slide. His selections are recorded and analyzed based on particular predetermined techniques. This pattern is then compared to the pattern of the true owner of the account and the system determines if it’s a close enough match to authenticate the user. To test this out, Vika created a survey consisting of slides of images and asked participants to click through them. There were two particular types of patterns we tested for that will be explained in depth later on in this paper. A linear regression model of these results was created and ran them back through the model to determine how accurately one could authenticate a user. The results pointed to this authentication method having very clear potential to be used as a secondary user authentication method.
Paper was published in 2015 International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction