This weekend, UMBC’s Cyber Defense Team (the ‘CyberDawgs’) took first place at the 2015 National CyberWatch Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC).

UMBC was one of ten teams that advanced to the regional finals held at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab on March 25-28. As the first place winner, the CyberDawgs will represent UMBC and the Mid-Atlantic region at the National CCDC in San Antonio, Texas April 24-26, 2015.

The final standings for this weekend’s action are:

1st: UMBC 1674450
2nd: UMCP 1321050
3rd: Towson 1159925

The CyberDawgs participating in the MA-CCDC finals were Jacob Rust, Tyler Campbell, Anh Ho, John Beers, Joshua Domangue, Chris Gardner, Julio Valcarcel, and David Young.

Interested in joining the CyberDawgs? Contact Jacob Rust (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) for more information — they’re always looking for new members! (The team meets weekly on Tuesdays at 7PM in ITE 227.)

The CyberDawg faculty advisors are Dr. Charles Nicholas and Dr. Richard Forno.

Name: James Ebong

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Discovery Communications | Title of Your Position: Global IT Business Operations Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Information Systems

Expected Graduation Year: 2016

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

As a Global IT Operations Intern, I have an awesome opportunity to work for the headquarters of the #1 Distributed Television Company in the world. My day-to-day tasks include supporting the Quality Assurance and Business Application teams. My main projects involve providing technical and business solutions for applications dealing with international contract management and domestic distribution. These applications are responsible for tracking over a billion dollars annually.

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I applied for their summer internship in my final semester at Montgomery College. I went through 3 stages of interviews before I received an offer.

Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?

Montgomery College

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

The thing I enjoyed most about my organization is that they kept the interns involved. The internship program created plenty of tours, workshops, networking, and charity events which helped us all bond and learn more about the company through former interns in other departments.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

The experience of working for a Fortune 500 company and seeing everything that goes into making a media giant like Discovery stay successful. I was also given the opportunity to get my certification in automated testing during my internship which I received before the beginning of the Spring Semester began.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

As I talked to HR managers in the company they stressed that grammatical errors in your resume are one of the biggest things that could stop you from getting to the next stage of the hiring process. With that being said, make sure you thoroughly review your resume and make sure you stand out during your interview.

Please provide a short reflection or quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

Definitely the opportunity to earn internship credit while working. It's a great opportunity due to how much you learn and the fact that you will be even more prepared for your career field.

Like this story on Facebook or FAV/RT on Twitter!

Like the Career Center on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

#UMBCintern

Enhancing System Security and Privacy with Program Analysis

Yinzhi Cao

Columbia University

12:00-1:00pm Tuesday, 31 March 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

Cyber security and privacy have brought the attention from the general public these days. Melissa Hathaway, who advised both President Obama and President Bush, estimated in a report that governments and consumers lost $125 billion annually to cyber-attacks, including losses in tax revenue. In this talk, from the perspective of program analysis, I will discuss the security and privacy of two important computer systems: Web browser and Android system. In the first part, I will introduce how to prevent and detect drive-by download attacks, which penetrate the boundary of a browser principal. In particular, I will present JShield, a vulnerability-based detection engine that is more robust to obfuscated drive-by download attacks, when compared to various anti-virus software and most recent research papers. In the second part, I will introduce EdgeMiner, the first automatic tool that creates summaries of Android framework in the form of callback and registration pairs. With the summaries, existing static analysis system can correctly construct a control flow graph with hidden control flow dependencies introduced by callback methods.

Yinzhi Cao is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in computer science at Northwestern University. Before that, he obtained his B.E. degree in electronics engineering at Tsinghua University in China. His research mainly focuses on the security and privacy of web, smart phones, and machine learning. He has published more than ten papers at various security conferences, such as Oakland, NDSS, ACSAC and DSN. His JShield system has been adopted by Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunication company. In the past, he served as a program committee member for IEEE CNS’14 and web chair for AsiaCCS SESP’13. Previously, he also conducted research at SRI International and UC Santa Barbara as a summer intern.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity in Chemistry (SUROC) provides students from outside the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill an opportunity to engage in hands-on cutting edge research in our state of the art facilities. This is an opportunity to experience Carolina Chemistry, recognized by ACS as one of the top ten graduate programs.

During the 10 weeks of research, students will be exposed to the various facets of independent research. A small cohort of 10 students will work together building a strong scholarly foundation. The experience will be heightened with the opportunities outside the hands-on laboratory work: site visits to large pharmaceutical and small startup companies; introduction to scientific entrepreneurship; experience presenting scientific research; training in research ethics; and exposure to chemical equipment and facilities.

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Blind Hashing; a new way to secure
passwords against offline attack

Jeremy Spilman

Founder/CTO of TapLink

11-12 Friday 27 March 2015, M/P 101, UMBC

Industry best practice is to secure passwords using a tunable hashing algorithm; pick the right hashing algorithm, tune its cost factors so it runs slowly and makes optimal use of your hardware, and it’s possible to protect very strong passwords from being cracked. However when average password strength and login latency requirements face off against bot-nets and GPU powered dictionary attacks, the vast majority of passwords are easily cracked. Blind hashing entangles password hashes with a massive pool of random data, so large it cannot be stolen over the network. A simple protocol allows any number of sites to share a centralized petabyte-scale data pool, amortizing the cost for defenders, while protecting low-entropy passwords with minimal run-time cost. Blind hashing can also be used as a general-purpose PBKDF to protect against brute-force attacks, and providing the opportunity to add server-based access policies and revocability to the key derivation process. Following his talk, Jeremy will be happy to discuss potential research opportunities with the company for students interested in developing new implementations of blind hashing for password-based authentication and encryption services.

Jeremy Spilman is the Founder and CTO of TapLink, a startup company that is developing systems using its patented Blind Hashing technique, which can completely protect passwords against offline attack, even if the password database is stolen. He was a double major in Computer Science and Economics at Brandeis University.