Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This pr ....Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This project aims to develop a continuous authentication approach based on user behaviour - typical interactions plus biometrics (for example, keystroke dynamics) - combined with a risk adaptive assessment of the resources being accessed, resulting in re-authentication requests in the event of a suspected compromise.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE190100046
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$387,000.00
Summary
Fortifying our digital economy: advanced automated vulnerability discovery. This project aims to enable security researchers to detect critical vulnerabilities in large software systems with maximal efficiency, cost-effectively, and with known statistical accuracy. The aim is to develop advanced high-performance fuzzers that effectively thwart malware attacks, ransomware epidemics, and cyber terrorism by exposing security flaws before they can commence. The project will employ a well-established ....Fortifying our digital economy: advanced automated vulnerability discovery. This project aims to enable security researchers to detect critical vulnerabilities in large software systems with maximal efficiency, cost-effectively, and with known statistical accuracy. The aim is to develop advanced high-performance fuzzers that effectively thwart malware attacks, ransomware epidemics, and cyber terrorism by exposing security flaws before they can commence. The project will employ a well-established statistical framework utilised in ecology research to provide fundamental insights to boosting the efficiency of software vulnerability discovery, and on the trade-off between investing more resources and gaining better cyber security guarantees. As our reliance on new technologies is ever growing, this project equips Australia to curb cyber crime cost-effectively.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE170101081
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$360,000.00
Summary
Adaptive value-flow analysis to improve code reliability and security. This project aims to develop client-driven adaptive value-flow analysis to detect software bugs in system software written in the C/C++ programme language. Static analysis tools for automated code inspections can benefit software developers, but are imprecise, inefficient and not user-friendly for analysing real-world industrial-sized software. The project will investigate static, dynamic and user-guided value-flow analysis t ....Adaptive value-flow analysis to improve code reliability and security. This project aims to develop client-driven adaptive value-flow analysis to detect software bugs in system software written in the C/C++ programme language. Static analysis tools for automated code inspections can benefit software developers, but are imprecise, inefficient and not user-friendly for analysing real-world industrial-sized software. The project will investigate static, dynamic and user-guided value-flow analysis to efficiently and precisely analyse large-scale programs according to clients’ needs, thereby allowing compilers to generate safe, reliable and secure code. This project is expected to advance value-flow analysis for industrial-sized software, improve software reliability and security, and benefit Australian software systems and industries.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE200100016
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$351,798.00
Summary
Enabling Compatible and Secure Mobile Apps via Automated Program Repair. This project aims to ensure everyone in Australia and the world can reliably utilise compatible and secure mobile apps on their smart devices, by inventing a novel approach to automatically fix compatibility and security issues during app development and installation. The project expects to generate new knowledge, tools and methods to support efficient mobile app fix through mining the best practices from the mobile ecosyst ....Enabling Compatible and Secure Mobile Apps via Automated Program Repair. This project aims to ensure everyone in Australia and the world can reliably utilise compatible and secure mobile apps on their smart devices, by inventing a novel approach to automatically fix compatibility and security issues during app development and installation. The project expects to generate new knowledge, tools and methods to support efficient mobile app fix through mining the best practices from the mobile ecosystem. Expected outcomes include better support for app developers to build mobile apps that will maximise the potential of the mobile ecosystem for Australian businesses. This should provide significant benefits, such as enhanced productivity for the software industry and better mobile app experience and safety for users.Read moreRead less
Improving Modern Programming Language Performance: A Memory-Conscious Approach. The performance of modern programming languages such as Java and C# lags that of imperative languages such as C and Fortran. A significant source of the performance gap is poor memory behavior, which future computer architectures will exacerbate. This project addresses the problem of poor memory behavior in modern programming languages such as Java and C# through an integrated attack that incorporates new garbage c ....Improving Modern Programming Language Performance: A Memory-Conscious Approach. The performance of modern programming languages such as Java and C# lags that of imperative languages such as C and Fortran. A significant source of the performance gap is poor memory behavior, which future computer architectures will exacerbate. This project addresses the problem of poor memory behavior in modern programming languages such as Java and C# through an integrated attack that incorporates new garbage collection algorithms, run-time techniques that optimize running programs, and new compiler analyses with both static and dynamic optimizations. The project will give Australia an
international presence in a research area of great academic and commercial importance.
Read moreRead less
A fast and effective automated insider threat detection and prediction system. Threats from insiders directly compromises the security, privacy and integrity of Australian e-commerce, large databases and communication channels. This project will provide an essential step in combating this criminal activity by developing methods to detect such threats and secure the public's information against exposure and identity theft.
Australian Laureate Fellowships - Grant ID: FL190100035
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$3,009,457.00
Summary
Human-centric Model-driven Software Engineering. This project aims to find fundamentally new ways to capture and use human-centric software requirements during model-driven software engineering and verifying that systems meet these requirements. There are major issues with misaligned software applications in terms of accessibility, usability, emotions, personality, age, gender, and culture. This project aims to address these through new conceptual foundations and modelling techniques for their s ....Human-centric Model-driven Software Engineering. This project aims to find fundamentally new ways to capture and use human-centric software requirements during model-driven software engineering and verifying that systems meet these requirements. There are major issues with misaligned software applications in terms of accessibility, usability, emotions, personality, age, gender, and culture. This project aims to address these through new conceptual foundations and modelling techniques for their support during software engineering. The intended outcomes are enhanced theory, models, tools and capability for next-generation software engineering with these critical elements. Significant benefits are expected to include greatly improved software quality, developer productivity and cost savings.Read moreRead less
Micro Virtual Machines: Abstraction, contained. This project will address a systemic source of inefficiency in widely used software which leads to many programs running as much as ten times slower and using considerably more energy than necessary, shortening battery life on mobile phones and increasing costs for large server farms. This inefficiency is endemic because it is due to the underlying languages rather than the particular software. This project will address this problem by developing a ....Micro Virtual Machines: Abstraction, contained. This project will address a systemic source of inefficiency in widely used software which leads to many programs running as much as ten times slower and using considerably more energy than necessary, shortening battery life on mobile phones and increasing costs for large server farms. This inefficiency is endemic because it is due to the underlying languages rather than the particular software. This project will address this problem by developing a high efficiency substrate, called a micro virtual machine, on which languages may be built.Read moreRead less
Large-Scale Emulation for Enterprise Software Systems. This project will deliver a key future software technology for scalable quality assurance of highly interconnected enterprise IT systems, significantly contributing to more reliable and effective business operations in all industry sectors. It will fill a market gap and give Australian businesses a world competitive advantage. The project will generate world-leading research outcomes and further cement Australia’s leading research position i ....Large-Scale Emulation for Enterprise Software Systems. This project will deliver a key future software technology for scalable quality assurance of highly interconnected enterprise IT systems, significantly contributing to more reliable and effective business operations in all industry sectors. It will fill a market gap and give Australian businesses a world competitive advantage. The project will generate world-leading research outcomes and further cement Australia’s leading research position in enterprise software systems engineering. In particular, it will make major contributions to research into complex large-scale system interaction, system performance and scalability, and system behaviour modelling. The project also provides an excellent training environment for young researchers. Read moreRead less
A framework for modelling feature variability and dependencies in software product lines. In most Australian software development organisations software products are developed individually rather than product line based. This project will promote the awareness of product line based software development and provide a frontier technology, the effective feature modelling approaches, to help Australian software industry transform from the single product based development to the product line based de ....A framework for modelling feature variability and dependencies in software product lines. In most Australian software development organisations software products are developed individually rather than product line based. This project will promote the awareness of product line based software development and provide a frontier technology, the effective feature modelling approaches, to help Australian software industry transform from the single product based development to the product line based development to achieve significant improvement on the productivity and the quality of the software development. This improvement will dramatically reduce the cost of software products and alleviate the pressure of skill shortage that currently threatens Australian economy.Read moreRead less