Thursday, October 23, 2008: 7:00 p.m.
Paul G. Allen Center, Microsoft Atrium
Tadayoshi Kohno, Assistant Professor, UW Computer Science & Engineering
Protecting the Bionic Man: Overcoming Security Challenges in Emerging Technologies
Abstract:
Today's and tomorrow's emerging technologies have the potential to greatly improve the quality of our lives. Without the appropriate checks and balances, however, these emerging technologies have the potential to also compromise our digital (and physical) security and privacy. A key goal of the UW CSE Computer Security Lab is to help us achieve the best of both world: the wonderful promises offered by the new technologies without the associated security and privacy risks.
This talk will examine several strands of our research, focusing first on our recent work with wireless implantable medical devices. Earlier this year we showed that it is possible for a wireless attacker to compromise the security and privacy of a real implantable defibrillator, and we are now developing methods for hardening medical devices against the attacks we identified. This talk will also examine a new research thread that we will only be able to publicly discuss on Thursday.
Speaker Bio:
Tadayoshi Kohno is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on assessing and improving the security and privacy properties of current and future technologies. Kohno is the recipient of a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and in 2007 he was awarded the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, recognizing him as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35. Kohno's analysis of a common pacemaker and implantable cardiac defibrillator sparked widespread discussion on the security and privacy of wireless medical devices. His 2003 analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine helped catalyze the national debate on e-voting security. He has presented his voting machine research to the U.S. House of Representatives and has been cited in media outlets ranging from The New York Times to CNN Headline News. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Best Paper and Outstanding Paper Awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), and the International Conference on Mobile Systems, Application, and Services (MobiSys). Kohno received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.