UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Securing the Cloud: The Need for Quantum Network Security
Brian Kelley, Senior Member IEEE
Associate Professor of ECE
The University of Texas at San Antonio

11:15am-12:30pm Friday, 22 April 2016, UMBC, ITE 227

A significant trend in cloud data centers virtualization has been the migration away from virtual machines (VMs) with multiple guest operating systems (OS) to containers with a single Host OS. Whereas VMs incorporate a hypervisor manager layer enabling the Host OS to spawn multiple guest OSs, containers support all the code, run-time tools, and system libraries to run workload applications from a single Host OS.

While all cloud-based platforms posses security vulnerabilities, the additional security challenges with container systems stem from the sharing of the Host OS among independent container applications.

In this presentation we pose the question, “Can we use quantum information concepts to protect the cloud?” We introduce Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols. We present schemes for cloud container security based upon concepts drawn from QKD and related concepts in quantum teleportation. We also propose a new framework for Quantum Container Security drawing upon concepts of quantum entanglement. We will also present information the Cloud Academic Research Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Dr. Brian Kelley is Associate Professor of ECE at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is a leading researcher on communication systems, 4G and 5G cellular, cloud communications, and smart grid communications. He is also a member of the Cloud Academic Center at the University of Texas. Dr. Kelley is currently on sabbatical leave as a consultant with the DoD in Washington D.C. His current research focus is on the intersection of software-defined networks, 5G communications, and cloud systems. He is Senior Member of the IEEE, was an Oak Ridge National Laboratory Summer Faculty Fellow in Quantum Information Science during the summer of 2015, was Globecom 2014 Chair for the High-Level Technical Program Committee, Associate Editor and Editorial Board of IEEE System Journal, 2011-2012, and Associate Editor of Computers & Electrical Engineering, Elsevier, 2008-2011; he founded the San Antonio IEEE Communications and Signal Processing Chapter, in 2008. From 2000-2006, he was Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Motorola and a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 2007, he has been Associate Professor of ECE and Director of the Wireless Next Generation Systems (WiNGS) Lab at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Kelley received his BSEE from Cornell University and his MS/PhD in EE from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992, where he was an ONR Fellow. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. Contact: Dr. Brian Kelley, (210) 706-0854 Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays (May 6: Enis Golaszewski, Hash bit sequences)

UMBC CSEE Seminar

IoT Device Security Research at Morgan State University

Dr. Kevin T. Kornegay

Professor and IoT Security Endowed Chair,
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Morgan State University

12:00-1:00pm Friday, 15 April 2016, ITE 239, UMBC

The Internet of Things (IoT) and its myriad of components are proliferating as they increasingly permeate all areas of life and work, with unprecedented economic effect. The IoT is the network of dedicated physical objects (things) whose embedded system technology senses or interacts with their internal state or external environment. Embedded systems use a combination of computer hardware and software to perform dedicated functions within a larger mechanical or electrical system. Examples of embedded systems include cell phones, personal digital assistants, gaming consoles, global positioning systems, etc. Over 98 percent of all microprocessors being manufactured are used in embedded system applications. In private industry and the public sector, IoT growth and possible uses are evolving rapidly. Critical infrastructures in transportation, smart grid, manufacturing and health care are highly dependent on embedded systems for distributed control, tracking, and electronic data collection. While it is paramount to protect these systems from hacking, intrusion or physical tampering, our current solutions are often based on a patchwork of legacy systems, and this is unsustainable as a long-term solution. Transformative solutions are required to protect these systems by engineering secure embedded systems. Secure embedded systems use cryptography and countermeasures to protect electronic data and commands to systematically achieve resiliency, stability, safety, integrity, and privacy. Engineering secure embedded implementations that are resistant to attacks is vital. Essential to achieving this goal is obtaining fundamental knowledge and understanding of the various types of vulnerabilities embedded systems present. Hence, in this talk, we will present our embedded systems security research activities including the IoT testbed, side-channel and fault injection analysis, and associated research projects.

Kevin T. Kornegay received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990 and 1992, respectively. He is presently Professor and IoT Security Endowed Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. His research interests include hardware assurance, reverse engineering, secure embedded system design, side-channel analysis, differential fault analysis, radio frequency and millimeter wave integrated circuit design, high-speed circuits, and broadband wired and wireless system design. Dr. Kornegay serves or has served on the technical program committees of several international conferences including the IEEE Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), EEE International Solid State Circuits Conference, the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, and the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium. He has also served a two-year term on the IEEE Solid-State Circuits AdCom committee, as well as, on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II and as Editor of IEEE Electron Device Letters and Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Special Issue on the 2004 Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Society of Black Engineers’ Dr. Janice A. Lumpkin Educator of the Year in 2005, the 2002 Black Engineer of the Year Award in Higher Education from U.S. Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine, the NSF CAREER Award, an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, the National Semiconductor Faculty Development Award, and the General Motors Faculty Fellowship Award. He was also selected as a participant in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and the German–American Frontiers of Engineering, where he later served on the organizing committee. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society and a senior member of the IEEE, as well as a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi.

Hosts: Professors Fow-Sen Choa (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) and Alan T. Sherman (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. )

About the CSEE Seminar Series: The UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering presents technical talks on current significant research projects of broad interest to the Department and the research community. Each talk is free and open to the public. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for future talks.

Distinguished Lecture Series, UMBC Department of Information Systems

Statistical Methods for Integration and Analysis of Opinionated Text Data

Dr. ChengXiang Zhai
Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10:00am Thursday 21 April 2016, ITE 459, UMBC

Opinionated text data such as blogs, forum posts, product reviews and online comments are increasingly available on the Web. They are very useful sources for public opinions about virtually any topics. However, because the opinions are scattered and abundant, it is a significant challenge for users to collect all the opinions about a topic and digest them efficiently. In this talk, I will present a suite of general statistical text mining methods that can help users integrate, summarize and analyze scattered online opinions to obtain actionable knowledge for decision making. Specifically, I will first present approaches to integration of scattered opinions by aligning them to a well- structured article or relevant ontology. Second, I will discuss several techniques for generating a concise opinion summary that can reveal the major sentiments and opinion points buried in large amounts of opinionated text data. Finally, I will present probabilistic generative models for analyzing review data in depth to discover latent aspect ratings and relative weights placed by reviewers on different aspects. These methods are general and can thus potentially help users integrate and analyze large amounts of online opinionated text data on any topic in any natural language

ChengXiang Zhai is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and bioinformatics, and has published over 200 papers in these areas with an H-index of 58 in Google Scholar. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and Information Processing and Management, and the Americas Editor of Springer’s Information Retrieval Book Series. He is a conference program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004, NAACL HLT 2007, ACM SIGIR 2009, ECIR 2014, ICTIR 2015, and WWW 2015, and conference general co-chair for ACM CIKM 2016. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a recipient of multiple best paper awards, Rose Award for Teaching Excellence at UIUC, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, IBM Faculty Award, HP Innovation Research Program Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

The Arduino microcontroller is a great device for anyone who wants to learn more about technology. It is used in a variety of fields in research and academia and may even help you get an internship. Our instructors have used the Arduino for researching self-replicating robots and remote-controlled helicopters, hacking into a vehicle’s control system, and using radars to detect human activity in a room. Some of the hackathon projects by our IEEE members include developing a drink mixer that wirelessly connects with a Tesla Model S and a full-body haptic feedback suit for the Oculus Rift. The Arduino is a wonderful tool and is fairly easy to use. Everyone should learn how to use it! If you plan to do research, this tool is definitely a must.

UMBC’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is hosting two Level 2 workshops this semester. They are hosted this Saturday, April 9th, and next Saturday, April 16th. These workshops will be ITE 239 from 2pm to 6pm.  These intermediate workshops are open to anyone who satisfies one of the following: (1) has taken or currently enrolled in CMSC 202 or CMPE 212, (2) has taken the Level 1 Arduino Workshop or (3) has equivalent experience.

You can  register here for either workshop. Contact Sekar Kulandaivel (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) if you have any questions.

You only need to bring your laptop and charger and download and install the Arduino IDE, which can be downloaded from here. We hope to see many of you this weekend and next! You REALLY don’t want to miss out on this opportunity.

Karuna Joshi (UMBC) and Seung Geol Choi (USNA) present during the USNA-UMBC Partnership Symposium. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC and U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) faculty researchers presented updates on five collaborative cybersecurity projects funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) during the inaugural USNA-UMBC Partnership Symposium, hosted by UMBC’s Office the Vice President for Research on March 22, 2016. The five projects presented are supported by three-year grants from the ONR, most of which are entering their second year of funding.

When the joint research initiative launched a year ago, Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC, described it as “the start of a long-term partnership.” The recent symposium was the first formal opportunity for the research teams to formally present their progress on tackling major cybersecurity challenges outlined when the partnership began.

Read more about the joint research and symposium here.

For the past ten years the UMBC Game Developers Club has organized a Digital Entertainment Conference with a day of games industry veterans speaking on a variety of topics.  The event is free, open to all, and includes lunch.

UMBC’s 11th annual Digital Entertainment Conference will be held from 11:00am to 5:00pm on Saturday, April 30, 2016 in Skylight Lounge on the 3rd floor of the Commons.

Presenters

• Marc Olano – UMBC Professor & Game GFX Programmer
• Eric Jordan – Senior Software Engineer at Firaxis
• Tom Symonds – Artist at Stardock Games
• Ching Lau – Senior Environment Artist at Zenimax
• Nate Flynn – Owner/Developer at Geek Monster Games

Schedule

Note: Q&A with the presenter occurs between each hour

11:00am-11:45am    Tom Symonds :: Life in the Art Department
12:00pm-12:45pm   Marc Olano :: Graphics Research for Games
01:00pm-02:00pm  LUNCH! Pizza and Drinks
02:00pm-02:45pm  Eric Jordan :: Game Industry Careers
03:00pm-03:45pm  Nate Flynn :: Convention Booths
04:00pm-04:45pm  Ching Lau :: Of Teaching in the Classroom

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Firmware Instruction Identification
using Side-Channel Power Analysis

Deepak Krishnankutty
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:15am-12:30pm, Friday, April 8, 2016, ITE 237

Power supply transients of encryption devices have been analyzed from the perspective of performing attacks to extract secret key or confidential information. Such attacks are based on exploiting the correlation between the power consumption of the device under attack and its underlying logic operations. However, side channel leakage through the power supply of instruction level events occurring on soft/hard core processors has not been extensively studied. Power traces of firmware running on general purpose processing units observed at low frequencies tend to reveal not just the variations in current consumption during individual clock cycles, but also information related to the sequence of instruction executions. In this talk, we present results from Side-Channel Analysis performed over multiple power supply pins and demonstrate the relationship between the power transients and machine-level instructions on an instance of the openMSP430 processor on an FPGA. This process is also applicable to standalone ASIC instances. Our approach is based on templates constructed from principal components representing instructions identified from the power profiles of different instruction sequences. The templates are then utilized for determining the order of clock cycles per instruction. This technique can be used to predict the sequence of clock cycles per instruction from the observed power profiles and identify anomalies caused by modification of code on a tightly constrained embedded system.

Deepak Krishnankutty is a PhD student in computer engineering at UMBC, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. (April 22, Brian Kelley, Securing the cloud. May 8, Enis Enis Golaszewski, Hash bit sequences).

The Secret Life of Mobile Applications

Dr. Julia Rubin, MIT

12:00pm Friday, 8 April 2016, ITE 325b, UMBC

As software becomes increasingly more complex and yet more pervasive, poor understanding of software behavior compromises the quality and the integrity of software systems that we use. In this talk, I will show that automated analysis techniques can help to identify and reason about software behavior characteristics that matter to humans. After a brief overview of my current research directions, I will focus on techniques for identifying privacy violations in mobile applications, i.e., leakages of sensitive information such as user location and shopping preferences. I will present a set of solutions that rely on contextual, functional and usage-based clues for improving the accuracy of leakage detection and for distinguishing between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” information distribution patterns.

Julia Rubin is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the EECS department at MIT. Prior to that, she was a Research Staff Member and, part of the time, a manager at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada in 2014. Julia’s research interests are in software engineering, program analysis and software security, focusing on improving the quality and the integrity of modern software systems. Her recent work in this area won an ACM Distinguished Paper Award at ASE, two Best Paper Awards, at SPLC and CSMR, and was nominated for Facebook’s Internet Defense Prize at the USENIX Security Symposium.

The UMBC School of Public Policy, bwtech@UMBC Cyber Incubator, and UMBC Center for Cybersecurity are sponsoring a form on Cybersecurity Concerns in Local Governments from 8:30-11:00am on Friday, April 15, 2016 at the Columbus Center in Baltimore.

“Like their counterparts in the private sector, it is important for local government officials and managers to understand cybersecurity threats to their websites and information systems and to take actions to prevent cyber attacks. The purpose of this forum is to present research on cybersecurity initiatives in local governments in Maryland, and highlight the public policy implications of these initiatives.”

There is no charge to attend this forum, but registration is required. For questions or more information, contact Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Visualizing (Scientific) Simulations with
Geometric and Topological Features

Prof. Joshua A. Levine, Clemson University
12:00pm Monday, 4 April 2016, ITE 325b, UMBC

Today’s HPC resources are an essential component for enabling new scientific discoveries. Specifically, scientists in all fields leverage HPC to do computational simulations that complement laboratory experimentation. These simulations generate truly massive data; visualization offers a mechanism to help understand the simulated phenomena this data describes.

This talk will present two recent research projects, both of which highlight new techniques for visualization based on characterizing and computing features of interest. The first project describes an algorithm for surface extraction from particle data. This data is commonly used in simulations for phenomena at small (molecular dynamics), medium (fluid flow, fracture), and large (astrophysics) length scales. Surface geometry allows standard computer graphics approaches to be used to visualize complex behaviors. The second project introduces a new data structure for representing vector field data commonly found in computational fluid dynamics and climate modeling. This data structure enables robust extraction of topological features that provide summary visualizations of vector fields. Both projects exemplify my vision for how collaborative efforts between experts in scientific and computational fields are necessary to make the best use of our HPC systems.

Joshua A. Levine is an assistant professor in the Visual Computing division of the School of Computing at Clemson University. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University after completing his BS and MS in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include visualization, geometric modeling, topological analysis, mesh generation, vector fields, volume and medical imaging, computer graphics, and computational topology.

Host: Prof. Adam Bargteil (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. )