CSC News
Enck Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award
Congratulations to Dr. William Enck, assistant professor of computer science at NC State University, on receiving a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This award, valued at $400,000, supports his proposal titled “Secure OS Views for Modern Computing Platforms”.These CAREER awards are the most prestigious NSF awards that support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the mission of their organizations.
Enck becomes the 22nd NSF CAREER Award winner for the Department of Computer Science at NC State (20th currently on faculty), one of the highest concentrations of any department in the nation.
The award is effective February 1, 2013 through January 31, 2018.
Research Abstract: The security architecture of consumer operating systems is currently undergoing a fundamental change. In platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows 8, each application is a separate security principal that can own data. While this distinction is a vast improvement over traditional user-focused security architectures, sharing data between applications results in an unexpected loss of control of that data, potentially exposing security and privacy sensitive information. This research improves the security of these modern consumer operating systems by providing a holistic view of data protection. In particular, this work proposes a new operating system abstraction for transparently tracking and controlling access to all data, allowing policy to determine if a reader is given the true value, a fake or modified value, or no value at all. To efficiently and practically accomplish this goal, this work combines several existing and new techniques to track and control access to data. The new abstraction provided by this work not only solves a significant problem affecting modern consumer operating systems by enabling applications to retain pervasive control over their data, but also more broadly provides a new abstraction on which a variety of new security solutions can be built.
Enck earned his PhD and MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and 2006, respectively, and his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Penn State in 2004. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and USENIX.
Enck’s research interests are in systems security, with a focus on mobile devices. For more information on Dr. Enck, click here.
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