Case Studies

The ISE team has conducted several public, independently researched projects that have captured the industry’s interest:

ISE development of the first public exploit on Apple’s iPhone.

This proof-of-concept exploit demonstrated the device’s vulnerability to malicious injection of code from a webpage. The exploit was widely reported, with articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  Read more.

ISE independent evaluation of the content protection systems in BluRay and HD-DVD players.

The evaluation, which included AACS and BD+, revealed several concerns with the AACS specification.

Reverse engineering the proprietary block cipher in the Texas Instrument TIRIS RFID transponder chip.

ISE was able to crack this commercial chip found in more than 150 million car keys in the US and in over 10 million Exxon Mobil speedpasses.

Analyzing the source code in Diebold’s e-voting machines.

This work resulted in a publication in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (the Oakland conference).

The first implemented key recovery attack on WEP.

ISE team members were the first to apply a theoretical attack on RC4 to IEEE 802.11 WEP to determine the key in a wireless network. ISE papers on the subject appeared in the ISOC Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) conference and in the journal ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC).