23-24 CSE Research Highlights – CSE Annual Report

CSE research + impact

CSE continues to drive computing for the greater good

Computer Scientists Discover Vulnerabilities in a Popular Security Protocol

A research team led by UC San Diego computer scientists including Nadia Heninger investigated the widely-used Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol and found a vulnerability they call Blast-RADIUS that has been present for decades. The widely used security protocol has vulnerabilities that could expose large numbers of networked devices to an attack and allow an attacker to gain control of traffic on an organization’s network. Researchers from Cloudfare, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, BastiionZero and Microsoft Research contributed to the paper that was presented at the USENIX Security 2024 conference.

Novel Attacks on Cybersecurity Unveiled

A UC San Diego-led research team that includes computer science PhD student Hosein Yavarzadeh and Professor Dean Tullsen found two novel types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors, which could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use. The paper, “Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor,” is based on findings from scientists from UC San Diego, Purdue University, Georgia Tech, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Google. Intel and AMD issued security alerts based on the findings.

Meet CARMEN, a Robot That Helps People with Mild Cognitive Impairment

CARMEN, short for Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation, is a small, tabletop robot designed to help people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) learn skills to improve memory, attention, and executive functioning at home. Unlike other robots in this space, CARMEN was developed by UC San Diego researchers, led by computer science and emergency medicine professor Laurel Riek, in collaboration with clinicians, people with MCI, and their care partners. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, CARMEN is also the only robot that teaches compensatory cognitive strategies to help improve memory and executive function.

A Simple Firmware Update Completely Hides a Device’s Bluetooth Fingerprint

A Smartphone’s unique Bluetooth fingerprint could be used to track the device’s user–until now. A team of researchers at UC San Diego have developed a simple firmware update that can completely hide the Bluetooth fingerprint, eliminating the vulnerability. The same team discovered the vulnerability caused by Bluetooth fingerprints in a study they presented at the 2022 IEEE Security & Privacy conference. They presented the fix to this vulnerability two years later at the 2024 IEEE Security & Privacy conference.

ASPLOS Best Paper Win for Technique to Improve Computer Processing

UC San Diego computer scientists including professor Dean Tullsen and alumna Sankara Prasad Ramesh (MS ’23) are working to untangle a complex bottleneck impacting modern high-performance processors.

They are part of a team that includes researchers from Princeton University and Intel that has proposed a novel instruction prefetching technique to target instruction cache misses and improve processing performance. Their paper, “PDIP: Priority Directed Instruction Prefetching,” received one of six best paper awards recently at the 2024 ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).

Intel Award for Transformative Hardware Security Fix

A joint academic and industry research team led by computer scientists from the UC San Diego have proposed a simple and transformative extension to existing processors to mitigate security breaches.

A team of eight professors, students, and alumni from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and their co-authors were honored during the 2024 USENIX Security Symposium at an event recognizing the top papers in hardware security for the previous year. They were one of just three teams to receive an Intel Hardware Security Academic Award, earning honorable mention for their paper, “Going beyond the Limits of SFI: Flexible and Secure Hardware-Assisted In-Process Isolation with HFI.”

CSE Researchers Influence Two Decades of Functional Programming Research

Professor Ranjit Jhala and alumni Niki Vazou (PhD ’16) and Eric L. Seidel (M.S., PhD ’16, ’17) were among those recognized for the transformative paper Refinement Types for Haskell at the 29th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). The paper received the Most Influential Paper Award and was selected from 10 years of ICFP research for its influence over the past decade and for solving real-world problems in Functional Programming.

Computer Science Researchers Are Getting it Wrong When it Comes to Autism Inclusivity

Nearly 90% of researchers who develop robots for autistic people didn’t bother to ask autistic people if they need the technologies, says Naba Rizvi, a computer science Ph.D. student and a self-identifying autistic woman. Rizvi raises this point in her work that investigates the stereotypes about neurodiversity perpetuated by computer science research. She is the first author of a new study, “Are Robots Ready to Deliver Autism Inclusion?: A Critical Review,” presented recently at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Computer Scientists Shed Light on Scene Re-rendering, Earning EGSR Best Paper Award

UC San Diego researchers have proposed a novel rendering technique that could increase rendering efficiency and produce more visually appealing images.

PhD student Bing Xu – part of a joint team of computer scientists from the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing (VISCOMP) and industry partner, Adobe – has developed a theoretical framework that sheds light on scene re-rendering with moving objects and material authoring. The paper, Residual Path Integrals for Re-Rendering, received a best paper award at the 2024 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) held recently in London