Design, Analysis and Security of Automotive Networks

Sekar Kulandaivel
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

2:00-3:30pm Friday, 29 April 2016, ITE 325b

As more electronic and wireless technologies permeate modern vehicles, understanding the design of an embedded automotive network becomes necessary to protect drivers from external agents with a malicious intent to disrupt onboard electronics. By analyzing the different types of automotive networks and current security issues that the industry faces, we will learn how intruders are able to access an automotive network, read data that streams from the connected nodes and inject potentially malicious messages. This presentation will cover the electrical design of automotive networks, the communication protocols between electronic control units, methods for analyzing network messages and a detailed overview of previous automotive attacks and current security issues.

Sekar Kulandaivel is a Meyerhoff Scholar and Computer Engineering undergraduate student at UMBC. He currently works on designing an intrusion detection system for automotive networks with Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee of the UMBC Eclipse Cluster. Sekar has had previous internships at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Northrop Grumman Corporation and Johns Hopkins University. He will attend Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2016 to pursue a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus in electric vehicle security.

Last October for CSJ: Baltimore 365, Women’s Center student staff members created displays for our Vines, Rhymes, and Headlines discussion/exhibit that explored media coverage and social media engagement surrounding the Baltimore Uprising. One year after the uprising, we’re looking back at some of the images and tweets that captured this important moment in our history.

What Happened at Mondawmin? See how events unfolded that afternoon to set the stage for the much-reported “riots.” (credit: Daniel Willey) 

Conversations around the Uprising were grounded in several hashtags, including #BaltimoreRiots, #FreddieGray, and #BaltimoreCurfew. (credit: Julia Gottlieb)

#BaltimoreUprising was used to counter the popular narrative of #BaltimoreRiots.

#FreddieGray and #SayHerName reminded us of the faces, names, and lives impacted by racist police violence.

#BaltimoreLunch addressed food insecurity in the city, while #BaltimoreCurfew illustrated the clear racial divide between how people experience policing.

An overview of anti-Black violence and Black trauma provided additional context and significance. (credit: Kayla Smith) 

And here are just a few of the many great articles we’re reading from around the web:

• Freddie Gray One Year Later
• A Year After the Baltimore Uprising, the Real Work Is Just Beginning
• A Year After Freddie Gray’s Death, A Look at Media’s Coverage of the Baltimore Uprising

Nestled in the back of room 109 of the Information Technology and Engineering building, Dan Bailey, head of the Image Researching Center (IRC) is being captured. He sits in the center of the room, in a open metal rig with cameras that are surrounding him. IRC staff walk around him, fine tuning each of the camera settings as they make their final preparations.

The lights turn off, and within a second a bright flash illuminates the room. The lights turn back on, and a staff member exclaims “got it” as another successful 3D capture has been performed at the IRC. In the next few hours a powerful computer will start to build a 3D scan of Dan Bailey.

“Being able to capture a 3D model is just a priceless ability,”

Outside of the room sits Dr. Marc Olano, a professor of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, who helps run the studio. Olano and Bailey worked with Direct Dimensions Inc, a company based in Owings Mills, Maryland, and funded the space through a $180,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Olano told Stephen Babcock, a reporter at Technical.ly Baltimore that “Being able to capture a 3D model is just a priceless ability,” and “That flash is the first step.”

Dr. Marc Olano outside the capture room. Here, he can view the 3D models and manipulate them.

The system is smart enough to ignore all the cameras around the person or object and instead finds unique points of features to focus on. In addition, there are projectors that help capture something that doesn’t have enough detail to focus on by projecting more detail onto a person or object so the person can find it.

Between captures, there are a couple of tools that are used to help calibrate the space. One tool is a pole that is used to help position the cameras using tape on the pole that gives reference points for the center and edge of the frame for the cameras.

For capturing, there is a calibration dummy made out of cardboard construction tubes with a lot of different clothing patterns. This is essential in making it easier to build a 3D model of the dummy, as the reconstruction process can find the shape of the object and camera positions simultaneously, but if the part of the object or person you are scanning is too featureless, it can have trouble solving for both of those at once

After the image is captured, the computer starts building a 3D model out of 90 images. Zooming in on the image, you can actually see each individual polygon that makes up the image.

3D scans of Marc Olano and Dan Bailey done in the capture studio.

“This [studio] serves as not only the intersection of art and computer science, but other disciplines as well.”

Olano believes that this 3D capture studio can go beyond computer science. “This [studio] serves as not only the intersection of art and computer science, but other disciplines as well.” When scanning in a person, it is possible to make that person into an animation model for use in video games.

Museums could ask to scan in historical objects so that one could rotate and inspect the object at any angle they want. People who have had amputations could get scanned and have something custom built for them. The possibilities for this space are immense and will continue to grow over time.

The 3D capture studio is still limited to only a few projects at a time but Olano hopes to open it up to more departments soon. You can view some of the scans the studio has done online here.

A brief thought by student staff Shira Devorah 

This coming Tuesday, I’m going vote in the Maryland Primaries!

I’m excited to participate in this election, but I am also really wary.

Voter suppression is a topic that’s pretty new to me. I’ve never voted before, let alone spent too much time looking into how it works. Most of my efforts have gone towards researching candidates, not worrying that I won’t even get a chance to speak. I knew a little bit about Photo ID laws (boo), but that was about it. I didn’t know about voter suppression before my more politically aware friend pointed it out to me. I like to think that I’m well informed, but clearly I haven’t been paying enough attention. And now that I’m about to vote for the first time, I’m worried that there are a ton of students just as unaware as I am.

Source: The American Civil Liberties Union

Voter suppression includes a range of strategies aimed at discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. It can be done legally, through unfair laws, or illegally, through underhanded tactics. Either way, it is a social justice and feminist issue. When politicians get in the way of equity for all, we must educate ourselves and take a stand against unjust practices.

I’m saddened, but not surprised, that America has legal (and illegal) things in place to stop eligible voters from casting their ballots. These unjust tactics are often employed to directly target and disenfranchise marginalized individuals, especially Black and Latinx people. People with prior felony convictions are just starting to get their right to vote back in some states, but overall do not get counted.

Students are also targeted through voter suppression. This recent  piece by The Retriever Weekly gives a close-to-home example. This is a huge social justice issue that all students should be aware of when we attempt to head to the polls on Tuesday. Not only so that we UMBC students are conscious of our own votes, but also so that we are aware of the suppression tactics facing our fellow citizens.

This info graphic from the ACLU is old, but gets the point across

Misinformation about voting procedures, like incorrect deadlines for absentee ballots, complicated instructions, and unfair waiting periods all add up to dissuading voters. There is a history of politicians and lobbyists spreading misinformation through shady robo-calls and flyers. On top of illegal practices, there are actual laws in place specifically created to suppress certain people’s votes. North Carolina’s Monster Voting law, which will have aspects present in this current voting period, would legally dissuade younger voters.

This was all disheartening for me to hear for the first time, but I was also inspired to learn that activist groups all over the country are fighting against voter suppression laws and dirty tricks.

North Carolina’s Vote Defender Project is a way that students are combating voter suppression. These activists are tasked with providing voters with accurate and easily understandable information about the upcoming election process. These vote defenders also look out for active voter suppression tactics and report instances of unjust practices, such as overly-long lines and inadequate equipment at polling stations.

NC Vote Defender, (credit: Vote Defender Project)

campusvoteproject.org  helps to empower and inform student voters, and you can look up information specific to your state and district through their website. The Fair Elections Legal Network is actively working to remove barriers to voting through corrective legislation.

People are speaking out and reaching students like me. Before a few days ago, I was completely clueless to this situation. I’m steadily learning, and I now  feel like I have a better grasp on how important my vote will be. I now know that there are political groups that do not want me to have my say and having a vote that’s counted is not something to take for granted. We are all just single voices in this election, but if we can come together as more informed citizens, maybe we can fight against those who are  trying to take our rights away. To my fellow students, I urge you to go out and make your voices heard. To dirty politicians who want me to stay home- I’ll see you at the polls.

the traditional voter sticker, (credit: Flicker.com)

CHMPR Seminar

Medical Epistemology: A Gerontologist’s Perspective

Dr. John D. Sorkin, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Maryland School of Medicine

3:00pm Wednesday, 27 April 2016, ITE 325b

The randomized clinical trial is the gold standard method by which we test a hypothesis positing an association between an exposure and outcome. Unfortunately many hypotheses are not grist for a clinical trial. It would, for example not be ethically permissible to randomize people to smoking vs. non-smoking if we wanted to study the hypothesis that smoking is associated with increased incidence of lung cancer. Similarly it would not be ethical to randomize pregnant women to being infected or not infected with Zika virus to determine if maternal Zika infection is associated with microcephaly. Clinical trials are also not helpful in determining the relation between a putative exposure and a rare disease such as Pick’s disease (a rare type of frontotemporal dementia) as the number of subjects who would need to be studied is prohibitively large.

The movement over the last decade away from paper-based charts to the electronic medical record (EMR) and advances in the speed of computers allow us to process large volumes of data in near real-time, and herald the advent of clinical studies based on “big data”. The availability of big data requires us to rethink how we can establish an association between cause and effect because the big data we obtain from the EMR are not collected from randomized clinical trials, and as noted above a clinical trial cannot be used to study many diseases. Further making inferences based on the EMR can be difficult because data gleamed from the electronic medical record can be confounded by changes brought about by the aging process which include primary aging (i.e., the aging process itself), secondary aging (i.e., changes brought about by changes in lifestyle as we get older) and tertiary aging (i.e., disease). Fortunately epidemiologists have designed and used study designs other than the clinical trials for years to gain insight into the relation between exposure and disease. The aim of my talk is to review five study designs, cross-sectional, time-series and longitudinal, case-control and cohort study designs, that can be used to identify change, quantify the rate at which changes occurs with aging, and to separate biological aging from the effects of life style and disease. In addition to presenting the five study designs, I will review the strengths and weaknesses of the five study designs. It is my hope that thinking about five study designs will help you design analyses that make use of big data to examine questions relevant to public health and treatment of disease.

Dr. John Sorkin is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His research examines the changes that occur with aging in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, obesity, and body fat distribution. He is interested in measuring the changes and determining the relation of the changes to the development of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, death, morbidity, and mortality. These interests have lead him to try to identify the phenotypes associated with longevity and the genetics of longevity in collaboration with Drs. Shuldiner and Mitchell. Dr. Sorkin is Chief of Biostatistics and Informatics for the Division of Gerontology and is PI of the Statistics Core for the University of Maryland Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center and Baltimore VA Geriatrics Research, Education and Clinical Center.