Shi Weighs in on Maintaining Cloud Security in MIT News

Elaine Shi, an assistant professor of computer science with appointments in UMIACS and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, was quoted in an MIT News story about a chip MIT researchers are developing to prevent cybercriminals from spying on data stored in the cloud.

Attackers can load up multiple cloud servers with small programs that do nothing but spy on other people’s data. Two years ago, MIT researchers proposed a method for thwarting these types of attacks by disguising memory-access patterns. Now, they’ve begun to implement it in hardware in the form of a chip.

“This is groundbreaking work,” says Shi. “For many years, this kind of secure algorithm has been prohibitive. This is basically the first time they’ve shown that you can achieve this 2x overhead. Previously, the overhead would be ridiculous, maybe in the tens of thousands. They built this thing and show that for, a class of benchmarks, the average slowdown is only 2x.”

MC2 is one of 16 centers and labs in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). It is jointly supported by the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and the A. James Clark School of Engineering.

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