Research

My research is centered around operating system security, computer architecture, and intrusion detection.

Conference Publications

• Aisha Hasan, Ryan Riley, and Dmitry Ponomarev, “Port or Shim? Stress Testing Application Performance on Intel SGX”, Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC-2020), Held Virtually, October 2020.
• Dmitry Evtyushkin, Ryan Riley, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, and Dmitry Ponomarev, “BranchScope: A New Side-Channel Attack on Directional Branch Predictor”, Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2018), Williamsburg, Virginia, March 2018. (17.6%)
• Jesse Elwell, Dmitry Evtyushkin, Dmitry Ponomarev, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, and Ryan Riley, “Hardening Extended Memory Access Control Schemes with Self-Verified Address Spaces”, Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD 2017), Irvine, California, November 2017. (26.3%)
• Zhengyang Qu, Shahid Alam, Yan Chen, Xiaoyu Zhou, Hongjun Wang, and Ryan Riley, “DyDroid: Measuring Dynamic Code Loading and Its Security Implications in Android Applications”, Proceedings of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2017), Denver, Colorado, June 2017. (22.3%)
• Baljit Singh, Dmitry Evtyushkin, Jesse Elwell, Ryan Riley, and Iliano Cervesato, “On the Detection of Kernel-Level Rootkits Using Hardware Performance Counters”, Proceedings of the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS 2017), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, April 2017. (20.3%)
  HPC traces available
• Vaibhav Rastogi, Rui Shao, Yan Chen, Xiang Pan, Shihong Zou, and Ryan Riley, “Are These Ads Safe: Detecting Hidden Attacks through the Mobile App-Web Interfaces”, Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2016), San Diego, California, February 2016. (15.4%)
• Dmitry Evtyushkin, Jesse Elwell, Meltem Ozsoy, Dmitry Ponomarev, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, and Ryan Riley, “Iso-X: A Flexible Architecture for Hardware-Managed Isolated Execution”, Proceedings of the 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2014), Cambridge, UK, December 2014.
• Noor Al-Nakhala, Ryan Riley, and Tarek M. Elfouly, “Clustered Binary Consensus in Sensor Motes”, Proceedings of the 20th European Wireless Conference (EW 2014), Barcelona, Spain, May 2014.
• Jesse Elwell, Ryan Riley, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, and Dmitry Ponomarev, “A Non-Inclusive Memory Permissions Architecture for Protection Against Cross-Layer Attacks”, Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Symposium On High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA 2014), Orlando, Florida, February 2014 (26%).
• Ryan Riley, Chris Clifton, and Qutaibah Malluhi, “Maintaining Database Anonymity in the Presence of Queries”, Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management (STM 2013), London, UK, September 2013 (32%).
• Noor Al-Nakhala, Ryan Riley, Tarek M. Elfouly, “Binary Consensus in Sensor Motes”, Proceedings of the 9th IEEE International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2013), Cagliari, Italy, July 2013.
• Junghwan Rhee, Ryan Riley, Dongyan Xu, Xuxian Jiang, “Kernel Malware Analysis with Un-tampered and Temporal Views of Dynamic Kernel Memory”, Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2010), Ottawa, Canada, September 2010 (23.1%).
• Zhiqiang Lin, Ryan Riley, Dongyan Xu, “Polymorphing Software by Randomizing Data Structure Layout”, Proceedings of SIG SIDAR Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware and Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA 2009), Milan, Italy, July 2009 (29.5%).
• Ryan Riley, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu, “Multi-Aspect Profiling of Kernel Rootkit Behavior”, Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2009), Nuremberg, Germany, April 2009 (16.9%)
• Junghwan Rhee, Ryan Riley, Dongyan Xu, Xuxian Jiang, “Defeating Kernel Dynamic Data Rootkit Attacks via VMM-based Guest-Transparent Monitoring”, To appear in the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2009), Fukuoka, Japan, March 2009. (25%)
• Ryan Riley, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu, “Guest-Transparent Prevention of Kernel Rootkits with VMM-based Memory Shadowing”, Proceedings of 11th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2008), Boston, MA, September 2008. (25%) Received the best paper award. Source code is available from here.
• Ryan Riley, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu, “An Architectural Approach to Preventing Code Injection Attacks”, Proceedings of IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-DCCS 2007), Edinburgh, UK, June 2007. (25%) Source code is available.

Journal Publications

• Maan Haj Rachid, Ryan Riley, and Qutaibah Malluhi, “Enclave-Based Oblivious RAM Using Intel’s SGX”, Computers & Security, Volume 91, April 2020.
• Mashael AlSabah, Gabriele Oligeri, and Ryan Riley, “Your Culture is in Your Password: An Analysis of a Demographically-diverse Password Dataset”, Computers & Security, Elsevier, Volume 77, August 2018.
• Rui Shao and Vaibhav Rastogi and Yan Chen and Xiang Pan and Guanyu Guo and Shihong Zou and Ryan Riley, “Understanding In-app Ads and Detecting Hidden Attacks through the Mobile App-Web Interface”, IEEE Transcations on Mobile Computing, February 2018.
• Shahid Alam, Zhengyang Qu, Ryan Riley, Yan Chen, and Vaibhav Rastogi, “DroidNative: Automating and Optimizing Detection of Android Native Code Malware Variants”, Computers & Security, Volume 65, March 2017.
• Dmitry Evtyushkin, Jesse Elwell, Meltem Ozsoy, Dmitry Ponomarev, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh and Ryan Riley, “Flexible Hardware-Managed Isolated Execution: Architecture, Software Support and Applications”, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), July 2016.
• Jesse Elwell, Ryan Riley, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Dmitry Ponomarev, Iliano Cervesato, “Rethinking Memory Permissions for Protection Against Cross-Layer Attacks”, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (ACM TACO), Volume 12, Issue 4, Article 56, December 2015.
• Noor Al-Nakhala, Ryan Riley, and Tarek M. Elfouly, “Distributed Algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks: An Approach for Applying Binary Consensus in a Real Testbed”, Computer Networks, Elsevier, Volume 79, March 2015.
• Junghwan Rhee, Ryan Riley, Zhiqiang Lin, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu, “Data-Centric OS Kernel Malware Characterization”, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 9(1), January 2014.
• Ryan Riley, “A Framework for Prototyping and Testing Data-Only Rootkit Attacks”, Computers & Security, Volume 37, September 2013, Pages 62-71.
• Ryan Riley, Xuxian Jiang, Dongyan Xu, “An Architectural Approach to Preventing Code Injection Attacks”, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 7(4), 2010.

Student Supervision

• Noor Al-Nakhala, “Binary Consensus in Senor Motes”.  Qatar University. MS in Computing. Graduated January 2013.
• Mohammed Al-Tamimi, “Performance of the Secure AODV Routing Protocol on Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)”. Qatar University. MS in Computing. Graduated June 2014.
• Mahmoud Maqboul, “Security Analysis of VPN Service in the Presence of Mixed IP Networks”. Qatar University. MS in Computing. Graduates June 2014.