Senior Project Opportunities
2022-2023 Projects
Various Projects with UC Santa Cruz
There are some Faculty Members at UC Santa Cruz who are interested in having our students work with them on various CPE and EE related projects. The slides linked below provide a handful of main areas that students are encouraged to explore further. If you are interested, Bridget Benson can support you in contacting a UCSC Faculty Member and figuring out a way to define a specific project.
Link | UCSC Opportunities
Side Channels
Activity Contact: Stephen Beard | srbeard@calpoly.edu
When thinking about computer security, we often focus on securing the parts of the computer we use and think about most often – the software and its execution. However, all computing devices are physical objects at some level with physical characteristics. Side Channel Attacks exploit the physical implementation of a system using physical artifacts that its operation creates – power, timing, electromagnetic radiation, sound, light, etc. For example, you can figure out someone’s cell phone PIN just by watching the power draw from its charger cable; you can easily crack a password using timing; you can turn a laser into a speaker and silently activate a smart home system! All kinds of really weird and interesting things are possible when you start to consider computing devices physical objects rather than magic math boxes. I am interested in advising any and all projects that investigate these types of attacks. These types of projects typically draw on a little bit of knowledge in many areas, and thus are great for individuals, teams, and cross-disciplinary groups. There is great potential for projects that have a heavy emphasis on reimplementing existing work, and those with more of a research element to them.
- Using a laser to transmit sound to silently induce a smart home type device.
- Hiding a cell phone power analysis device in a USB cable
- Extending current work in cell phone power analysis to deduce typed text rather than just 10 key PINs
- AC power analysis for cell phone PIN discovery rather than 5 V DC
- Acoustic analysis of keyboard typing to deduce text
- Voltage glitching attacks to directly attack systems
Cyber Physical Systems
Activity Contact: Stephen Beard | srbeard@calpoly.edu
Operational Technology (OT, think factories and power plants) have long been the realm of analog control with some isolated digital systems. Thus, the threat model that such systems have classically faced has excluded many of the classical threats that the Information Technology (IT, think laptops and servers) realm has dealt with. With the increasing connectivity in our world and the business desire for more and more “big data” driven decisions, many OT spaces are being driving towards connectivity. This clashing of worlds has serious consequences for security that we have already begun to see — the damage caused by a cyber incident in a power plant, water treatment plant, or hospital has serious risk of injury and loss of life.
- Closed Loop PLC Controlled Systems
- Traffic light control system
- Simulated power plant / distribution system
- Suspend ping pong ball in a column of air
- System Administration
- Imaging and backup of servers and workstations
- Racking and installing hypervisor-based server
- Network IDS configuration and analysis
- Attack Exploration
- Attacks circumventing data diode-based networks
- Human Machine Interface PLC attacks
- Hardware trojan based attacks
Architectural Security
- Architectural simulations for security
- FPGA based implementations of hardware security-based techniques
- Formal verification of hardware and software designs
- Exploration of security policy-based communication verification
- Further exploration of software with clear specification between inputs and outputs for verification-based protection
Whale Detangler
Pitch2Programmers
Pitch2programmers is a hybrid event that will be held on November 17th, 2022, from 3:30 to 6:30 PM in the advanced technology lab at Cal Poly (Building 7). It aims to bring senior students at Cal Poly and stakeholders/advisors/project managers/faculty together for creative and unique learn by doing senior project experiences. In order to receive up to date information, the schedule, and the Zoom link, we require students register their interest in the event: https://forms.gle/Ufvm1m7AHxzptHK29
Link | Pitch2Programmers Event | CSC Senior Project Description