Shockley '17 & Maixner '17 Present Honor-Thesis Findings

With the support of the USMA Cyber Research Center, 2LT Matt Shockley and 2LT Chris Maixner (both with degrees in computer science) presented the findings from their honors-thesis research at the 9th ACM CCS International Workshop on Managing Insider Security Threats in Dallas, Texas. Their work involved developing a software system which permits users legitimate access to confidential information while preventing them from misusing that information, such as by sharing it with an unauthorized third party. To accomplish this without disturbing benign users or other software, presented a number of challenges which they describe in a paper published in the workshop proceedings. The 2017 USMA Cyber Defense Exercise team put VisorFlow into practice where it prevented 2,940 malicious events. 2LT Shockley and 2LT Maixner have released under an open source license the entire VisorFlow system along with VisorFlow’s companion library, guestrace. Guestrace consolidates many techniques used by VisorFlow in a way which allows other software developers to make use of them.