REU Site: Software Security

Title: REU Site: Software Security

This project offers a nine-week summer program for 10 undergraduate students to gain research experience in software security at Boise State University. During the summer program, each student works with a faculty mentor on a carefully designed research project. The recruiting effort focuses on students from underrepresented groups and academic institutions with limited research opportunities or without cybersecurity programs. At least 50% participants are selected from other academic institutions. The intellectual merits of this project are that the research experiences motivate undergraduate students to purse graduate studies in software security, an area of national priority, and that students make innovative contributions and advance the knowledge base in emerging areas of software security. The broader significance and importance is that this project allows a diverse pool of motivated students from underrepresented groups and universities with limited research opportunities to gain research experiences in software security. The process of learning how to do research, write up and present research results, better prepares students for their future field of study. By focusing on the critical area of software security, an area in which there are few trained experts, the site addresses a pressing national need by training qualified students.

Under the supervision of faculty mentors, the students work on research projects related to various software security issues. Sample projects are assurance of obligatory attribute-based access control, automated debugging of attribute-based access control policies, secure development of software-defined networking applications, and efficient symbolic execution for detection of software vulnerability.