UMBC CSEE Professor Marie desJardins will be a guest on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi show from 12:00 to 1:00pm tomorrow, Tuesday, June 17, 2014. She will be one of three experts discussing Coding and the Computer Science Conundrum with Kojo and callers. Listen live over the air on WAMU (88.5 mhz) or online.  After she broadcast, you can hear it on the segment’s page or download it from their podcast archives.

The program’s description is:

“For years following the dot-com bust, computer science enrollment plunged steadily, prompting hand wringing over America’s competitiveness in technology and innovation. But a nationwide push to bring coding to classrooms, plus rapid innovation in apps and communications, has prompted a 13.4% jump in computer science majors in the 2012-13 academic year alone. But retaining those budding programmers — especially females and minorities — remains a significant challenge. Kojo explores local and national efforts to boost computer science competency, and learns how educators are revamping computational learning to give it relevance far beyond the classroom.”

The expert guests are:

• Pat Yongpradit, Director of Education, Code.org
• Marie desJardins, Prof. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• Janice Cuny, Program Director of Computing Education, National Science Foundation

Listeners can ask questions or make comments during the show via Twitter (@kojoshow) or phone (800-433-8850).

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education Workshop

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
9:30 – 4:30 Tuesday, 24 June 2014

Innovations in Cybersecurity Education is a regional workshop on cybersecurity education at all levels, from Kindergarden through post-graduate. It will include discussions about cyber competitions, hands-on exercises, educational games, and integrating cybersecurity throughout the curriculum. There will be an opportunity to experience hands-on cyber defense exercises and to play new computer security education games, including SecurityEmpire developed at UMBC.

The workshop is free and open to the public — all are welcome to attend. This workshop will to be of interest to educators, school administrators, undergraduate and graduate students, and government officials.

Please see the links above for the schedule and location and register to help us plan for the number of participants.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Alan T. Sherman with support provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

• Thwarting Obfuscated Malware via Differential Fault Analysis 
  Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, Juan E. Tapiador, Flavio Lombardi, and Roberto Di Pietro describe how detecting malware in mobile applications is increasingly complex as malware developers are better able to hide or obfuscate malicious components. Alterdroid is a dynamic-analysis tool that compares behavioral differences between an original app and numerous automatically generated versions of it containing carefully injected modifications.
  
• RootGuard: Protecting Rooted Android Phones
  Though popular for achieving full operation functionality, rooting Android phones opens these devices to significant security threats. Yuru Shao, Xiapu Luo, and Chenxiong Qian describe how RootGuard offers protection from malware with root privileges while providing user flexibility and control.
  
• Smart AppStore: Expanding the Frontiers of Smartphone Ecosystems
  According to Félix Gómez Mármol, Gregor Rozinaj, Sebastian Schumann, Ondrej Lábaj, and Juraj Kačur, Smart AppStore offers five important features for today's smartphone users: biometric authentication, multilevel authorization, gesture recognition and navigation, user-tailored reputation scores, and identity management.
  
• Securing the "Bring Your Own Device" Paradigm
  The current mobile application distribution model cannot cope with the complex security requirements of the emerging "bring your own device" (BYOD) paradigm. Alessandro Armando, Gabriele Costa, Luca Verderame, and Alessio Merlo explain how a secure metamarket architecture supports the definition and enforcement of BYOD policies and offers a promising prototype implementation tested under realistic conditions. 
  
• Security in the Firefox OS and Tizen Mobile Platforms
  Olga Gadyatskaya, Fabio Massacci, and Yury Zhauniarovich explore how emerging mobile platforms Firefox OS and Tizen are learning from Android's security successes and trying to avoid its limitations. Although these platforms offer largely novel solutions, they can still learn from one another.
  

The Conquer site provides resources for undergraduate students interested in research, graduate school, and research careers in computing-related fields. It also provides resources for faculty mentors, looking to engage and advise undergraduates in research and prepare them for graduate school in computing fields. The site is maintained by the Computing Research Association, an organization (of which our department is a member!) with the mission to enhance innovation by joining with industry, government and academia to strengthen research and advanced education in computing.

Specific topics of interest to undergraduate students that are covered are:

• What is computing research
• Finding research opportunities
• Undergraduate research awards
• Why go to graduate school?
• The graduate school application process

Ph.D. Dissertation proposal

Creating a Collaborative Situational-Aware IDPS

Lisa Mathews

11:00am Tuesday, 10 June 2014, ITE 346

Traditional intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) have well known limitations that decrease their utility against many kinds of attacks. Current state-of-the-art IDPSs are point based solutions that perform a simple analysis of host or network data and then flag an alert. Only known attacks whose signatures have been identified and stored in some form can be discovered by most of these systems. They cannot detect “zero day” type attacks or attacks that use “low-and-slow” vectors. Many times an attack is only revealed by post facto forensics after some damage has already been done.

To address these issues, we are developing a semantic approach to intrusion detection that uses traditional as well non-traditional sensors collaboratively. Traditional sensors include hardware or software such as network scanners, host scanners, and IDPSs like Snort. Potential non-traditional sensors include open sources or information such as online forums, blogs, and vulnerability databases which contain textual descriptions of proposed attacks or discovered exploits. After analyzing the data streams from these sensors, the information extracted is added as facts to a knowledge base using a W3C standards based ontology that our group has developed. We have also developed rules/policies that can reason over the facts to identify the situation or context in which an attack can occur. By having different sources collaborate to discover potential security threats and create additional rules/policies, the resulting situational-aware IDPS is better equipped to stop creative attacks such as those that follow a low-and-slow intrusion pattern. Leveraging information from these heterogeneous sources leads to a more robust, situational-aware IDPS that is better equipped to detect complicated attacks. This will allow for detection in soft real time. We will create a prototype of this system and test the efficiency and accuracy of its ability to detect complex malware.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (Chair), Tim Finin, John Pinkston, Charles Nicholas, Claudia Pearce, Yul Williams