Greater New England Research Interest Group Meeting [November 2021]
Massachusetts Open Cloud Security Investigations – Dylan Stewart, Red Hat and Tyler Sheehan, University of Massachusetts Lowell (20 min)
Security topics include network enumeration, subdomain enumeration, fuzzing, and cookie/session manipulation. For each topic we will discuss our methodologies as well as the results from our security and penetration tests in the Massachusetts Open Cloud.
View the .pdf presentation
Open Hardware Initiative Edge Testbed Demo – Pinaki Bhagavan, University of California, Berkeley (20 min)
The Open Hardware Initiative aims to resolve numerous challenges within hardware development, namely vendor lock-in, ease of prototyping, and ease of deployment. Vendors lock in both physical hardware and development toolchains for FPGAs. Development with these toolchains is time-expensive and making minuscule changes to the function of a hardware program takes extensive time for HDL rewriting, compiling, and board reprogramming. The Edge Testbed is a practical demonstration of methods to get around these issues utilizing open-hardware principles. The basis of the testbed works by replacing the typical HDL-based development of hardware boards with software development. Instead of uploading HDL code to program functionality, we upload C code to a pre-programmed RISC-V CPU within the board. While the program is run within the board, we can capture the output through UART and display the results. Furthermore, the current testbed itself is based on a generic low-end FPGA board, but future iterations would support implementation on any hardware choice the developer picks, as well as any architecture.
This demonstration shows an implementation of an image classifier in the form of a binary SVM for determining if an object is an apple or not. Although the classification is simple, we show this demonstration as a proof-of-concept of the rapid development on the testbed, as well as explicitly define a work pipeline for developing similar applications within the board. The demo will show the need for open-hardware technology and and products like the testbed in more detail as well as discuss the process of developing on this board, including the challenges and failures that came with it.
View the .pdf presentation