A paper authored by Adam Morrison, CS ’19, has been accepted at USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud ’18). This is collaborative work with Ang Chen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, as well as their research collaborators Lei Xue and Daniel Luo in Hong Kong.
“Enforcing Context-Aware BYOD Policies with In-Network Security” is the title of the paper written by Morrison.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has become the new norm for many enterprise networks but it also raises security concerns. As one of the main contributors to the project, Morrison presents a vision of programmable in-network security, and sketches an initial system design called Poise. Poise has a high-level policy language that can express a wide range of existing and new security policies.
These policies can then be compiled to device configurations to collect device and apps information, as well as switch programs that enforce security inside the network. Initial results are promising: Poise runs with reasonable overhead, and it successfully detects policy violations for several useful BYOD policies.
“This started as Adam’s course project in COMP 645, Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems," Chen said. "A course project is optional in this class, but Adam approached me and asked about opportunities to do a research project as part of the course. Since the main target of the class is graduate students, Adam is the only undergrad in COMP 645. But he is a quick learner: the project required him to learn many new things, and he tackled the challenges very successfully. I am extremely proud of Adam’s achievement,” he said.
“Undergraduate publication is extremely helpful, regardless of what I want to do in the future,” Morrison said. “I’m not looking at this as a career boost, I’m doing this because it is extremely interesting. I really want to learn more about research. I’m really thankful for all Dr. Chen has done for me and for all the opportunities he’s given me. He is a great mentor,” he said.
Cintia Listenbee, CS Publicist