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Securing the World's Cyber Infrastructure

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CSIS Seminar

Securing the Internet of Things

Speaker:   Dr. Philip Levis
When:   Monday, February 13, 2017, 11:00am - 12:00pm
Where:   Research Hall, Room 163

Abstract

Embedded, networked sensors and actuators are everywhere. They are in engines, monitoring combustion and performance. They are in our shoes and on our wrists, helping us exercise enough and measuring our sleep. They are in our phones, our homes, hospitals, offices, ovens, planes, trains, and automobiles. Their streams of data will improve industry, energy consumption, agriculture, business, and our health. Software processes these streams to provide real-time analytics, insights, and notifications, as well as control and actuate the physical world. The emerging Internet of Things has tremendous potential, but also tremendous dangers. Internet threats today steal credit cards. Internet threats tomorrow will disable home security systems, flood fields, and disrupt hospitals.

The Secure Internet of Things Project (SITP) is 5-year collaboration between Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Its goal is to rethink how we design, implement and test the Internet of Things so that it is secure and dependable. I'll give an overview of the project, its research goals, and its participants. I'll talk about two research efforts in the project: Tock, a secure embedded operating system, and Beetle, a new abstraction layer for Bluetooth networks that is able to support a much wider range of applications.

Speaker Bio

Philip Levis is an Associate Professor in the computer science and electrical engineering departments at Stanford University. He’s published some papers and won some awards. He likes his students a lot and so tries to buy them snacks very often. He loves great engineering and has a self-destructive aversion to low-hanging fruit. He wandered around George Mason a lot as a teenager and even helped with the phone and delivering mail at the systems engineering department one summer when it was between administrative assistants.