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David Evans
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My research seeks to create systems that can be trusted even in the presence of malicious attackers. This involves many traditional research areas, including security, software engineering, programming languages, cryptography, and networking. I'm particular interested in approaches that apply cryptography and diversity to provide security and privacy.
I am the Founding Director of the Interdisciplinary Major in
Computer Science (BA) for students in the College of Arts and
Sciences that was approved in February 2006. I was Program Co-Chair for
the 2010 IEEE
Symposium on Security and Privacy ("Oakland"). I am co-editing
a special issue of Security and Privacy magazine on the "Science of
Security" (CFP,
PDF).
In Fall 2010, I will teach cs2220: Engineering Software (a course I developed originally, but have not taught since 2006). In Spring 2010, I taught cs3102: Theory of Computation. In Fall 2009, I taught cs1120: Computer Science from Ada and Euclid to Quantum Computing and the World Wide Web, an introductory Computer Science course; I am developing a textbook for the course: Introduction to Computing: Explorations in Language, Logic, and Machines.
I am funded primarily by grants from the National Science Foundation and MURI awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
I joined UVA's Computer Science Department in November 1999 after completing my PhD, SM and SB degrees at MIT. I was on sabbatical for the 2008-2009 academic year. I visited UC Berkeley for the Fall semester, and Microsoft Research (Redmond) for the Spring.
Research
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Students
Q: How realistic is the depiction of SIS in the James Bond films?
James Bond, as Ian Fleming originally conceived him was based on
reality. But any author needs to inject a level of glamour and
excitement beyond reality in order to sell. By the time the filmmakers
focused on Bond the gap between truth and fiction had already
widened. Nevertheless, staff who join SIS can look forward to a career
that will have moments when the gap narrows just a little and the
certainty of a stimulating and rewarding career which, like Bond's, will
be in the service of their country.
Q: Why can't I download or write to you via this site?
SIS has kept this site browse only for security reasons.
From the FAQ of
the Secret Intelligence Service
All it took was for a University of Virginia student to finally outsmart
the popular SMART cards... Falling into the wrong hands, this security
loophole can be and will surely be used in high profile heists and
break-ins, seemingly straight from a James Bond movie.
Hacked
RFIDs Render Smart Cards Less Smarter, TrendLabs Malware Blog,
18 March 2008.
I am a little troubled about the tea service in the electronic computer
building. Apparently the members of your staff consume several times as
much supplies as the same number of people do in Fuld Hall and they have
been especially unfair in the matter of sugar.... I should like to raise
the question whether it would not be better for the computer people to
come up to Fuld Hall at the end of the day at 5 o'clock and have their
tea here under proper supervision.
Letter to John von Neumann (shown in George Dyson's talk on The birth of the computer)
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I have the privilege of working with a team of extraordinary students, including both graduate
and undergraduate students. If you are a UVa undergraduate or graduate
student interested in joining my research group, please look over our
project pages (linked below), browse
our group blog, and send me email
to arrange a meeting or drop by my office
hours. If you are considering applying to our PhD program, please
read my advice for prospective
research students. If you think you are ready for graduate school,
you may also want to try our previous pre-qualification
exam [PDF]. Everyone is welcome at the Security Reading
Group meetings (held in summer 2010 every Monday, 3-4pm in Olsson 236D).
Active Projects
Automatic
Identification and Protection of Security-Critical
Data with Westley Weimer (NSF CyberTrust)
Protects vulnerable programs by storing security-critical data in a
separate protected store.
Uses the disk processor to improve virus detection and response by
recognizing viruses by their disk-level activity.
Helix with
Jack Davidson, Yan
Huang, John Knight,
Anh Nguyen-Tuong, Jeff Shirley, Westley Weimer and
colleagues at UC Davis, UCSB, New
Mexico (MURI)
Protect systems from sophisticated and motivated adversaries by
automatically and continuously changing the attack surface of a running
system.
Implementable
Privacy for RFID with Ben Calhoun, John Lach,
Karsten Nohl, and
abhi shelat
(NSF Cybertrust)
RFID tags have already been widely deployed in security-sensitive
applications including public transportation tokens and access
cards. We are investigating new approaches to cryptography, protocol, and system
design to provide adequate security on minimal devices.
Explores a systems framework that uses structured artificial diversity
to provide high security assurances against large classes of attacks.
Recent Projects
Genesis
with Jack Davidson, John Knight, and Anh Nguyen-Tuong (DARPA)
Explores the potential for using automatically generated diversity at
various levels of abstraction to protect computer systems.
Inexpensive Program
Analysis (NASA, NSF CAREER)
Reducing the cost and improves the scalability of program analysis using
lightweight static analysis (Splint).
Perracotta with Jinlin Yang (NSF CPA)
Develops techniques for automatically inferring temporal properties of
real world software using dynamic analysis.
Physicrypt
(NSF ITR)
How computing in the physical world impacts security.
Social networking platforms integrate third-party content into the site
and give third-party developers access to user data, posing serious
privacy risks. We are developing a privacy-by-proxy
design for a privacy-preserving API.
Programming the
Swarm (NSF CAREER)
Getting sensible behavior from collections of unreliable, unorganized
components.
Recent and Upcoming Conferences
31st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2010),
Program Committee Co-Chair
17th
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2010),
Program Committee Member
30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2009),
Program Committee Co-Chair
28th International Conference on
Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2008) (Security and Privacy Track),
Program Committee Member
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2008),
Program Committee Member
14th
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2007), Publications Chair
2nd International
Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA) (May 2004), General and PC co-chair
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Death Valley
Teaching
My teaching has been supported by an NSF CCLI Award (PDF) and University Teaching Fellowship (2001-2002, PDF). I won the Harold Morton Jr. SEAS Award for Teaching (2003-4), an All-University Teaching Award (2008), and an Outstanding Faculty Award (2009) from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. This essay explains my teaching philosophy.I am writing an introductory computing textbook based on the cs200/cs150/cs1120 course.
Courses
More
My most visited page is my Advice for Prospective Research Students. I have also written some advice of giving talks, and collected my favorite advice from others.
My academic genealogy traces back to Gottfried Wilheim Leibniz.
I have taken some pictures including: Yellowstone, Glacier, Death Valley, Yosemite, Lawn Lighting, Nature near Charlottesville, China, and Bletchley Park. I also have pictures from my trips to World Cups: France 1998, Korea 2002, South Africa 2010.
Family pages: Free Street Theater (my sister is Creative Director), HandyFind (my brother's site), Science Serving Society (my Dad's site, focusing on traffic safety), Art Talks (by my Mom).