Trusted CI podcast: Recent Episodes
Trusted CI
Trusted CI is the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. The mission of Trusted CI is to lead in the development of an NSF Cybersecurity Ecosystem with the workforce, knowledge, processes, and cyberinfrastructure that enables trustworthy science and NSF’s vision of a nation that is a global leader in research and innovation. More information can be found at trustedci.org.
With the recent rise of LLMs, it becomes increasingly possible (and necessary) to conduct human-subjects studies with AI tools. However, integrating AI in human-subjects research raises concerns about participant privacy, safety, and the confidentiality of research data. These concerns are exacerbated by the fact that many AI researchers have limited experience with human-subjects research, and most ethics review boards (e.g. IRBs) have little knowledge about AI.In this talk, I present findings from a series of investigations into human-centered AI research studies: our team systematically reviewed AI-related studies published at the ACM SigCHI conference, we interviewed researchers who conducted human-subjects studies with LLMs, and we conducted a scenario-based study to unpack study participants' opinions about AI-based research. We find that (1) many papers lack important details about basic study parameters, (2) researchers often fail to disclose the use of LLMs to research participants, and (3) participants are sensitive to study parameters like anonymization, data retention and consent, but are unaware of the threats of third-party data sharing and of data leakage through model training. I will discuss these findings, and more, during the talk.Speaker Bio: Dr. Bart Knijnenburg is an Associate Professor in Human-Centered Computing at Clemson University where he co-directs the Humans And Technology Lab (HATLab). His research explores the societal, social, and psychological aspects of human interaction with intelligent systems. His research has been funded by the NSF (including a CAREER award), the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and corporate gifts.
Operational Technology (OT), when installed on an organization's network, becomes part of the overall cyber attack surface for an organization. When procuring this OT, it is important for the purchasing organization to understand how it will integrate with the existing network and security controls as well as understand what new risks it might introduce. The Trusted CI Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix (the Matrix) provides a prioritized list of questions for organizations to send to manufacturers and suppliers to try to get as much of this information as possible.In this webinar, we will walk through what security issues impact OT, the role of procurement in mitigating security risks, our reasoning and process for developing the Matrix, and a walk through on how to use the Matrix at your organization. Questions and shared experiences with OT are encouraged.TARGET AUDIENCE:Organizational leadership, procurement department, IT, cybersecurityThe Matrix can be found at https://trustedci.org/ot-matrixSpeaker Bio: Chief Security Analyst Mark Krenz is focused on cybersecurity operations, research, and education. He has more than two decades of experience in system, network administration, programming, and system security and has spent the last decade focused on cybersecurity. He also serves as the CISO of Trusted CI.
The unprecedented growth in networked edge devices (e.g., scientific instruments, sensors) has caused a data deluge in scientific application communities. The data processing is increasingly relying on distributed computing to cope with the heterogeneity, scale, and velocity of the data. At the same time, there is an abundance of low-cost computation resources that can be used for “volunteer edge-cloud computing” (VEC), where collaborators in a community (e.g., bioinformatics, manufacturing) contribute their resources to form a distributed infrastructure to execute scientific workflows. In this talk, a VEC management reference architecture and a related framework implementation will be presented for support of trusted resource allocation in VEC environments for scientific data-intensive workflows. We demonstrate how our novel scheduling approach optimizes task allocation on VEC nodes by balancing workflow requirements and resource preferences, improving latency, task completion times, and resource utilization efficiency. Lastly, we outline our recent efforts to ensure privacy-preservation of the scientific workflow execution in VEC environments by adopting principles from the confidential computing paradigm.Speaker Bio: Prasad Calyam is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor and the Greg L. Gilliom Professor of Cybersecurity in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Missouri-Columbia, and Director of the Center for Cyber Education, Research and Infrastructure (Mizzou CERI). His research and development areas of interest include: Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. He has published over 235 peer-reviewed papers in various conference and journal venues. As the Principal Investigator, he has successfully led teams of graduate, undergraduate and postdoctoral fellows in Federal, State, University and Industry sponsored R&D projects sponsored by National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Security Agency and others. His basic research and software on multi-domain network measurement and monitoring has been commercialized as ‘Narada Metrics’.
In this talk, we will first discuss techniques to improve the resiliency of hazard monitoring systems. This includes optimizing machine learning training pipelines for wildfire detection to achieve faster, more accurate results while adapting to real-world constraints such as data variability and network latencies. We will also explore enabling multi-tenancy to maximize resource efficiency by allowing multiple hazard detection workflows to share infrastructure without compromising performance. Furthermore, we will present an in-depth analysis of power and energy consumption for edge devices deployed in remote and resource-constrained environments, emphasizing sustainable and scalable design choices that support long-term operation. Next, we will describe ongoing efforts to enhance the security of critical cyberinfrastructures. This includes developing techniques to prevent denial-of-service attacks that could disrupt hazard monitoring workflows and implementing secure data transmission mechanisms to safeguard information across distributed CI layers.Speaker Bios: Sudarsun Kannan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. His research focuses on operating system design and its intersection with computer architecture, distributed systems, and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. His work has been published in top venues such as ASPLOS, OSDI, and FAST, and he has received best paper awards at SOSP and ASPLOS, along with the Google Research Scholar award. He co-chaired the HotStorage'22 workshop and serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Storage. Before joining Rutgers, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Wisconsin-Madison and graduated with an M.S. and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer and Data Sciences, and co-directs the Oregon Networking Research Group (ONRG) at the University of Oregon. Ram earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and his B.Tech. in Information Technology from the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Anna University. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in various conferences, journals, and workshops. His research has been recognized with several awards including the NSF CAREER award, NSF CRII award, Ripple faculty fellowship, UO faculty research award, best paper awards from ACM CoNEXT and ACM SIGCOMM GAIA, and has been covered in several fora (NYTimes, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Boston Globe, Gizmodo, Mashable, among others). Recently, his research on Internet topology has been named as "One of the 100 Greatest Innovations," has been cited in FCC's Spectrum Frontiers 2d Report and Order, and has won a number of awards including the "Best of What's New" (in security category) by the Popular Science Magazine.
Data-driven collaborations often involve sharing large-scale datasets in cloud environments, where adversaries may exploit server vulnerabilities to access sensitive information. Traditional approaches, such as Trusted Execution Environments, lack the scalability for parallel processing, while techniques like homomorphic encryption incur prohibitive computational overheads. ARMOR addresses these limitations by developing encrypted querying techniques that support a variety of scientific data types and queries, balancing efficiency with privacy. The project’s interdisciplinary team focuses on advancing encryption methods, improving query performance for multidimensional data, and rigorously evaluating security risks and overheads under real-world scenarios.A recent research under ARMOR is the development of Secure Standard Aggregate Queries (SSAQ), a novel approach for secure aggregation on multidimensional sparse datasets stored on untrusted servers. Aggregation functions like SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX, and STD are essential for scientific data analysis but pose privacy risks when performed on encrypted data. Existing methods using searchable encryption suffer from access pattern and volume leakage and are often limited to one-dimensional settings. SSAQ overcomes these challenges by employing d-dimensional segment trees to precompute responses for all possible query ranges, thus improving the efficiency of secure range queries.To further reduce leakage, SSAQ integrates Oblivious RAM (ORAM) to conceal data access patterns during query execution. This combination ensures a higher level of security, making SSAQ suitable for complex scientific data scenarios where sensitive information needs to be safeguarded. The approach significantly extends the applicability of searchable encryption techniques, offering a scalable and efficient solution for secure data analytics in cloud environments while minimizing privacy risks.Speaker Bio: Dr. Hoda Maleki is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University, specializing in system security, applied cryptography, and blockchain technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Maleki's research addresses critical security challenges, including IoT security, secure data retrieval in encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving data access in cloud environments. Her work leverages the Universally Composable (UC) security framework to analyze complex systems and employs multi-dimensional searchable encryption to protect massive scientific datasets. With over $1 million in NSF funding, her research advances scalable, efficient cryptographic solutions that meet the security needs of modern data-driven applications.
NSF cyberinfrastructure is undergoing a security transformation: a migration from X.509 user certificates to IETF-standard JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). This migration has facilitated a re-thinking of authentication and authorization among cyberinfrastructure providers: enabling federated authentication as a core capability, improving support for attribute, role, and capability-based authorization, and reducing reliance on prior identity-based authorization methods that created security and usability problems. In this webinar, members of the SciAuth project (https://sciauth.org/ - NSF award #2114989) will provide a short, hands-on tutorial for cyberinfrastructure professionals to learn about JWTs, including SciTokens (https://scitokens.org/ - NSF award #1738962). Participants will use Jupyter Notebooks to validate the security of JWTs and experiment with JWT-based authentication and authorization. Participants will gain an understanding of JWT basics suitable for understanding their security and troubleshooting any problems with their use.Speaker Bios: Dr. Jim Basney is a principal research scientist in the cybersecurity group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director and PI of Trusted CI. Jim received his PhD in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Dr. Derek Weitzel is a research assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. He has been providing distributed computing solutions to the national cyberinfrastructures since 2009. He is a member of the OSG’s production operations team and leads the operations of the National Research Platform. His current areas of research involve distributed data management for shared and opportunistic storage, secure credential management, and network monitoring and analytics.
At ESnet, we pride ourselves on being cutting-edge, even if it causes a few scratches. Every new branch of Zeek is automatically built and tested in Gitlab CI. Then, every night, the latest successful 'master' build is deployed, along with all of our packages and scripts, to a test system via Ansible. As time permits, we roll out the latest build, in production, to over 40 servers. Through this process we've both been able to provide early feedback to the Zeek project about potential bugs and give ourselves an early warning system when changes impact our production plugins and scripts.Zeek is an open source network security monitoring tool. This does not focus on the use of Zeek itself, but rather the care and feeding of our installation footprint.Speaker Bio: Michael “Dop” Dopheide has spent the majority of his career working in the R&E community specializing in systems engineering, security research, incident response, and network intrusion detection. He especially enjoys helping coworkers debug problems at the packet and protocol levels. In addition to his operational security role, Dop helps support the open source Zeek community and volunteers every year to beta test the SANS Holiday Hack challenge.
Controls aren’t everything, but they are an important rubber-meets-the-road component of your cybersecurity strategy and program. This webinar will help you will understand the role controls play in a competent cybersecurity program through the lens of the Trusted CI Framework. And, with help cutting through the noise of the many, many controls and control sets in the wild, it will introduce you to the Transformative Twelve, a small, highly prioritized, evidence-based set of cybersecurity controls.Speaker Bio: Craig Jackson is Deputy Director at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, where his R&D interests include evidence-based approaches to security, cybersecurity fundamentals, and cybersecurity program development and governance. He leads collaborative work with critical infrastructure partners. His work includes the Trusted CI Framework, the Information Security Practice Principles, and the Cybertrack and USN’s PACT assessment methodologies. Craig’s education background is in law, education, psychology, and philosophy.
NSF's major facilities represent some of the most significant research facilities on the globe. The forthcoming revision to the Research Infrastructure Guide (or RIG) details NSF's guidance on securing these facilities and its expectations for cybersecurity programs at the major facilities. This presentation will explain how we approached shaping this guidance, the unique challenges we faced, and offer a peek at some of the resulting guidance the revised RIG will provide.Speaker Bio: Michael Corn has been a CISO at four institutions (UIUC, Illinois System, Brandeis University, and most recently UC San Diego). A regular author on a variety of privacy, cybersecurity and identity related topics, he is currently the Cybersecurity Advisor for Research Infrastructure in the Office of the Chief Officer for Research Facilities and additionally provides support to the Office of the Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy within NSF. A recent online presentation on cybersecurity policy can be found at https://bit.ly/3JIpI8w.
Cybersecurity and privacy threats increasingly impact our daily lives, our national infrastructures, and our industry. Recent newsworthy attacks targeted nationally important infrastructure, our government, our researchers, and research facilities. The landscape of what needs to be protected and from what threats is rapidly evolving as new technologies are released and threat actors improve their capabilities through experience and close collaboration. Meanwhile, defenders often work in isolation, use private data and facilities, and produce defenses that are quickly outpaced by new threats. To transform cybersecurity and privacy research into a highly integrated, community-wide effort, researchers need a common, rich, representative research infrastructure that meets the needs across all members of the community, and facilitates reproducible science. To meet these needs, USC Information Sciences Institute and Northeastern University have been funded by the NSF mid-scale research infrastructure program to build Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation (SPHERE). This infrastructure will offer access to an unprecedented variety of hardware, software, and other resources connected by user-configurable network substrate, and protected by a set of security policies uniquely aligned with cybersecurity and privacy research needs. SPHERE will offer six user portals, closely aligned with needs of different user groups. It will support reproducible research through a combination of infrastructure services (easy experiment packaging, sharing and reuse) and community engagement activities (development of realistic experimentation environments and contribution of high-quality research artifacts).Speaker Bios:Dr. Jelena Mirkovic is Principal Scientist at USC-ISI and Research Associate Professor at USC. She received her MS and PhD from UCLA, and her BSc from University of Belgrade, Serbia. Jelena's research interests span networking and cybersecurity fields, as well as testbed experimentation. Her current research is focused on authentication, use of machine learning for network attack detection, large-scale dataset labeling for security, and user privacy. She is the lead PI on the SPHERE project.Mr. David Balenson is Senior Supervising Computer Scientist and Associate Director of the Networking and Cybersecurity Division at USC-ISI. He received his MS and BS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. His current research interests include cybersecurity and privacy for critical infrastructure and cyber-physical systems including automotive and autonomous vehicles, experimentation and test, technology transition, and multidisciplinary research. He is the Community Outreach Director for SPHERE.
The ACCORD cyberinfrastructure project at the University of Virginia (UVA) successfully developed and deployed a community infrastructure providing access to secure research computing resources for users at underserved, minority-serving, and non-PhD-granting institutions. ACCORD's operational model is built around balancing data protection with accessibility. In addition to providing secure research computing resources and services, key outcomes of ACCORD include creation of a set of policies that enable researchers external to UVA to access and use ACCORD. While the ACCORD expedition achieved its technical and operational goals, its broader mission of broadening access to underserved users had limited success. Toward gaining a better understanding of the barriers to researchers accessing ACCORD, our team carried out two community outreach efforts to engage with researchers and computing service leaders to hear their pain points as well as solicit their input for an accessible community infrastructure.In this talk, we will describe the ACCORD infrastructure and its operational model. We will also discuss insights from our effort to develop policies to balance accessibility with security. And finally, we wil share lessons learned from community outreach efforts to understand institutional and social barriers to access.Speaker Bios:Ron Hutchins: In the early 1980’s, Ron worked at the Georgia Institute of Technology to create a networking laboratory in the College of Computing teaching data communications courses there. After moving to the role of Director of Campus Networks in 1991, Ron founded and led the Southern Crossroads network aggregation (SoX) across the Southeast. In 2001 after receiving his PhD in computer networks, he took on the role of Chief Technology Officer for the campus. In August of 2015, Ron moved into the role of Vice President of Information Technology for the University of Virginia, working to build partnerships across the campus. Recently, Ron has moved from VP to research faculty in the Computer Science department at UVA and is participating broadly across networking and research computing in general including work with the State of California building out the broadband fiber network backbone across the state. Tho Nguyen is a computer science and policy expert. He served as project manager for the ACCORD effort from 2019-2021, and continues to support the project implementation and growth. Nguyen is currently a Senior Program Officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. From 2015-2021 Nguyen was on the research staff in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia where he worked on compute-in-memory and developing HPCs for research. Prior to UVA, he was a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation where he worked primarily on the Cyber Physical Systems program. Nguyen holds a PhD in Systems & Controls (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Washington.
The envisioned advantage of sharing research data lies in its potential for reuse. Although many scientific disciplines are embracing data sharing, some face constraints on the data they can share and with whom. It becomes crucial to establish a secure method that efficiently facilitates sharing and verification of data and metadata while upholding privacy restrictions to enable the reuse of scientific data. This presentation highlights our NSF-funded Open Science Chain (OSC) project, accessible at https://www.opensciencechain.org. Developed using blockchain technologies, the OSC project aims to address challenges related to the integrity and provenance of research artifacts. The project establishes an API-based data integrity verification management service for data-driven research platforms and hubs, aiming to minimize data information loss and provide support for managing diverse metadata standards and access controls.Speaker Bio:Subhashini Sivagnanam is the manager of the Cyberinfrastructure Services and Solutions (CISS) group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center/ UCSD. Her research interests predominantly lie in distributed computing, cyberinfrastructure development, scientific data management, and reproducible science. She serves as the PI/Co-PI on various NSF/NIH projects related to scientific data integrity and developing cyberinfrastructure software. Furthermore, she oversees the management of UC San Diego’s campus research cluster known as the Triton Shared Computing Cluster.
As the use of wastewater for public health surveillance continues to expand, inevitably sample collection will move from centralized wastewater treatment plants to sample collection points within the sewer collection system to isolate individual neighborhoods and communities. Collecting data at this geospatial resolution will help identify variation in select biomarkers within neighborhoods, ultimately making the wastewater-derived data more actionable. However a challenge in achieving this is the nature of the wastewater collection system, which aggregates and commingles wastewater from various municipalities. Thus various stakeholders from different cities must collectively provide information to separate wastewater catchments to achieve neighborhood-specific public health information. Data sharing restrictions and the need for anonymity complicates this process.This talk presents our approaches to enabling data privacy in wastewater-based epidemiology. Our methodology is built upon a cryptographic technique, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), ensuring privacy. Additionally, we outline a technique to enhance the performance of HE, which could be of independent interest.Speaker Bio:Ni Trieu is currently an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University (ASU). Her research interests lie in the area of cryptography and security, with a specific focus on secure computation and its applications such as private set intersection, private database queries, and privacy-preserving machine learning. Prior to joining ASU, she was a postdoc at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. degree from Oregon State University.
More than a decade ago, Clemson University outlined the requirements needed to integrate several campus-wide enterprise applications in a way that would automate the exchange of data between them, and establish the relationships of that data to the unique identities that represented all users within the system, including faculty, staff, students, alumni and applicants. There would be no direct access of data, except through applications that were approved and had established Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) contracts in place. This project was known as the Clemson Vault.
Within the Identity Management space, solutions for automating the provisioning of identities are offered by several vendors these days. However, mileage and cost vary when you wish to integrate arbitrary university resources, such as mailing lists, disk storage, building card access, and course registrations. Open source solutions, with all of the above requirements, are non-existent.
At Clemson University, we combined licensed vendor software and in-house apps, scripts and procedures to create a data integration solution that met the original requirements. This implementation has served us well for many years, but many of the drawbacks to the current design prompted us to begin pulling out many of these features into its own project, where we could collaborate on features and enhancements for the future with institutions outside of our own organization. The patterns, interfaces, and source code that emerged from the original vault were extracted out, embellished and migrated into an open source repository known as Adaptive Framework (https://github.com/afw-org/afw).
Clemson University has been working on this project for several years now, and has recently released this open source framework for building data access solutions that provide web service API’s, data transformation tools, real-time data provisioning and an authorization architecture. The framework that has emerged offers a built-in scripting language, pre-compiled server-side applications and an administrative web interface.
Although it was originally designed for the implementation of an open source identity vault, we envision a broader adoption of this framework for other data-driven needs, such as extending databases with metadata, building policy-based authorization systems, and integrating data repositories with a metadata catalog, and varying levels of access control, across federated environments.
Our goal with this project is to gather external support from both commercial and public institutions to help make this framework sustainable moving forward.
Speaker Bio: Jeremy Grieshop is a software engineer (B.S. Miami University, M.S. Clemson University) and has been employed by Clemson University since 2001. His role has been in software development for the Identity Management team and has been directly involved in the software design and implementation of many of the authentication and provisioning software, along with self service tools that are in place at Clemson University today.
Ransomware has become a global problem. Given the reality that ransomware will eventually strike your system, we focus on recovery and not on prevention. The assumption is that the attacker did enter the system and rendered it inoperative to some extent.
We start by presenting the broad landscape of how ransomware can affect a computer system, suggesting how the IT manager, system designer, and operator might prepare to recover from such an attack.
We show the ways in which ransomware can (and sometimes cannot) attack each component of the systems. For each attack scenario, we describe how the system might be subverted, the ransom act, the impact on operations, difficulty of accomplishing the attack, the cost to recover, the ease of detection of the attack, and frequency in which the attack is found in the wild (if at all). We also describe strategies that could be used to recover from these attacks.
Some of the ransomware scenarios that we describe reflect attacks that are common and well understood. Many of these scenarios have active attacks in the wild. Other scenarios are less common and do not appear to have any active attacks. In many ways, these less common scenarios are the most interesting ones as they pose an opportunity to build defenses ahead of attacks.
The Ransomware Report they discussed during the presentation is here:
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/118242
And, the latest version of our Guide to Securing Scientific Software, is here:
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/118240
Speaker Bios:
Barton Miller is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and the Amar & Belinder Sohi Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a co-PI on the Trusted CI NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, where he leads the software assurance effort and leads the Paradyn Tools project, which is investigating performance and instrumentation technologies for parallel and distributed applications and systems. His research interests include software security, in-depth vulnerability assessment, binary and malicious code analysis and instrumentation, extreme scale systems, and parallel and distributed program measurement and debugging. In 1988, Miller founded the field of Fuzz random software testing, which is the foundation of many security and software engineering disciplines. In 1992, Miller (working with his thenstudent Prof. Jeffrey Hollingsworth) founded the field of dynamic binary code instrumentation and coined the term “dynamic instrumentation”. Miller is a Fellow of the ACM and recent recipient of the Jean Claude Laprie Award for dependable computing.
Miller was the chair of the Institute for Defense Analysis Center for Computing Sciences Program Review Committee, member of the U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs Cyber Security Review Committee (POFMR), member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Computing, Communications and Networking Division Review Committee, and has been on the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force (Chicago Area).
Elisa Heymann is a Senior Scientist on TrustedCI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an Associate Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She co-directs the MIST software vulnerability assessment at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.
She coordinates in-depth vulnerability assessments for NFS Trusted CI, and was also in charge of the Grid/Cloud security group at the UAB, and participated in two major Grid European Projects: EGI-InSPIRE and European Middleware Initiative (EMI). Heymann's research interests include software security and resource management for Grid and Cloud environments. Her research is supported by the NSF, Spanish government, the European Commission, and NATO.
Thousands of people fall for online scams every year. Anyone can be scammed, but older adults in the US are the most targeted population in the world. By far. Those over age 60 lost over $3 Billion last year—and that’s just the ones who reported it. One of the fastest growing scams aimed at seniors is romance scams, especially those involving cryptocurrency, which is largely impossible for US law enforcement to prosecute. Websites and education programs to inform seniors about scams exist, but they’re not interactive and engaging and often treat seniors like they are clueless. Our project – Deception Awareness and Resilience Training (DART) is building a fun, spy themed mobile video game for senior citizens that will be released this summer. This talk will give some background on how the latest scams work, especially ones based around cryptocurrency, and show you how we’ve assembled a multidisciplinary team, including a professional game development company, to arm seniors to defend themselves against scammers!Speaker Bio:Anita Nikolich is a Research Scientist and the Director of Research and Technology Innovation at the University of Illinois's School of Information Sciences and Director of Research at Inca Digital, a digital asset analytics company. She is Co-PI of the NSF-funded FABRIC Midscale Research Infrastructure, Co-PI of an NSF-funded Convergence Accelerator project, Deception Awareness and Resilience Training (DART) and PI on a DARPA funded SBIR, Mapping the Impact of Digital Financial Assets (MIDFA).
On September 1, 2022, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS Cyberinfrastructure started production operations, ushering in a new era following two decades of cooperative cyberinfrastructure partnerships among several leading centers for High Performance Computing (HPC) at U.S. universities and research institutions under the NSF TeraGrid and XSEDE projects. The NSF ACCESS Cyberinfrastucture is composed of five funded projects, including an ACCESS Coordination Office and four tracks representing (1) resource allocations, (2) user support and training, (3) operations, including cybersecurity, data management and networking, and (4) monitoring and measurement services. ACCESS Resource Provider (RP) sites include several NSF-funded HPC systems deployed at U.S. universities and research facilities nationwide, on which computing time and storage are allocated on a peer-reviewed basis managed through the ACCESS project.In this webinar, we will describe the functions and activities of the ACCESS Cybersecurity Operations Group, and summarize the progress, challenges, and lessons learned in its first year. Topics will include authentication and identity management (AIM), cybersecurity communications and readiness, policy development, and future directions.Speaker Bio:Derek Simmel's career in Cybersecurity and HPC spans over four decades. Derek joined the technical staff of the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute in 1995. He brought his experience to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) in 2001. Derek is currently a co-PI for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS COre National Ecosystem for CyberinfrasTructure (CONECT) project, and leads Cybersecurity Operations for ACCESS. He also provides infrastructure design, cybersecurity and scientific workflow support for PSC's NSF-funded Bridges-2 system, and PSC's NIH-funded Brain Image Library, HuBMAP, and ANTON projects. Since 2011, Derek has chaired The Americas Grid Policy Management Authority (TAGPMA), one of three PMAs that comprise the Interoperable Global Trust Foundation (IGTF). He has served on the Technical Steering Committee for the Linux Foundation OpenHPC project since 2016, and on the Governing Board for OpenHPC since 2019.
The Internet2 Routing Integrity Initiative aims to improve the research and education (R&E) community’s adoption of best practices that strengthen the resilience and reliability of data movement across the R&E network ecosystem to support our shared missions. Routing integrity is an end-to-end challenge that requires the participation of the entire Internet2-networked community and beyond. This presentation will cover the pillars of the Routing Integrity Program and review resources you can use better to understand your organization's adoption of these practices:Measurement and ReportingEducationGlobal CoordinationOutreach and AdvocacyAdoption of Best PracticesSpeaker Bio:As Internet2’s Director of Routing Integrity, Steve Wallace promotes the adoption and improvement of routing security and integrity throughout the Internet2 community. He has been an active community member for over 24 years, having started as the engineer responsible for the team that built Abilene, Internet2's first network.
The NIH Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) aims to enable the broad use of Common Fund (CF) data sets to accelerate discovery. CF programs generate a wide range of diverse and valuable data sets designed to be used by the research community. However, these data sets reside in different locations, and it is challenging or even impossible to work with multiple data sets in an accessible and user-friendly way. To help remedy this problem, the CFDE has created an online discovery portal that helps make CF data sets FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and enables researchers to search across CF data sets to ask scientific and clinical questions from a single access point. The CFDE Coordinating Center oversees CFDE activities and works closely with participating data coordinating centers from other CF programs on an initial subset of data sets, with plans to expand to additional CF data sets. As the security officer for the CFDE Coordinating Center, Rick used the Trusted CI Framework to focus cybersecurity efforts on protecting the trust amongst the CFDE participants. This mission-driven approach significantly clarified the CFDE's cybersecurity planning.Speaker Bio:Rick Wagner is a Principal Research Systems Integration Engineer at UCSD. Rick began his career using cyberinfrastructure as a tool for research in astrophysics, working on problems in cosmology and supersonic turbulence. His research was largely done on campus, NSF, and DOE computing resources, the same kinds of systems he later managed for SDSC. Rick took a break from UCSD to work for Globus at the University of Chicago, helping researchers with data management solutions. Now Rick is part of the Research IT team, helping to design solution for projects that cut across the campus and beyond it. He is also trying to smooth the boundary between cybersecurity and research, and was a 2021 Trusted CI Fellow.
Remote monitoring and control of industrial control systems are protected using firewalls and user passwords. Cyberattacks that get past firewalls have unfettered access to command industrial control systems with potential to harm digital assets, environmental resources, and humans in proximity to the compromised system. In this talk, I will discuss our approach to prevent and mitigate such harms in scientific industrial control systems by enhancing the security of open-source cyberinfrastructure: the open-source Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) real-time operating system and the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) software and networks. The RTEMS and EPICS software projects are widely used cyberinfrastructure for controlling scientific instruments. This talk will discuss security problems that we have explored with these communities, and examine the salient challenges and opportunities presented by working with open-source communities on their cybersecurity needs.Speaker Bio:Gedare Bloom received his Ph.D. in computer science from The George Washington University in 2013. He joined the University of Colorado Colorado Springs as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 2019 and Associate Professor in 2022. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Howard University from 2015-2019. His research expertise is computer system security with emphasis on real-time embedded systems. He has published over sixty peer reviewed articles, serves as a program committee member and technical referee for flagship conferences and journals, and is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.Since 2011 Dr. Bloom has been a maintainer for the RTEMS open-source hard real-time operating system, which is used in robotics frameworks, unmanned vehicles, satellites and space probes, automotive, defense, building automation, medical devices, industrial controllers, and more. Some of his key contributions to RTEMS include the first 64-bit architectural port of RTEMS, design and implementation of a modern thread scheduling infrastructure, support for running RTEMS as a paravirtualized guest for avionics hypervisors, and implementation of POSIX services required to be compliant with the FACE avionics standard. Additionally, he mentors and guides students around the world through learning about and developing with RTEMS. He co-authored the textbook “Real-Time Systems Development with RTEMS and Multicore Processors” published by CRC Press in 2020.
A Science DMZ is a special network architecture designed to improve the speed at which large science data transfers can be made over the Internet while maintaining security of the assets. This webinar will provide an overview of the Science DMZ architecture, how to secure it, and cover use cases such as the statewide science network in Arkansas.Speaker Bios:Mark Krenz: Mark Krenz is the Chief Security Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and the Deputy CISO of Trusted CI. He is focused on cybersecurity operations, research and education. He has more than two decades of experience in system and network administration and has spent the last decade focused on cybersecurity.Don DuRousseau: Don is Director of Research Technology at the University of Arkansas. He has over 20 years leadership experience in research technologies, cyberinfrastructures, cybersecurity, and informatics. He is an active researcher and contributor in areas of programmable networking, advanced computing, bioinformatics, and human systems engineering. He leads the NSF CC* CIRA: Shared Arkansas Research Plan for Community Cyberinfrastructure (SHARP) project in planning the statewide research cyberinfrastructure (RCI) operations and researcher training and support strategy for providing HPC and other research resources and services to all the universities and colleges in Arkansas.Don was responsible for the operation and growth of the 100-G R&E Network (CAAREN) Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network in Washington D.C. In addition, he led the operations of the HPC resources and distributed support services on campus and built the Capital Region Advanced Cyber Range (CRACR) through the NSF CICI: Regional: Substrate for Cybersecurity Education; a Path to Training, Research and Experimentation project carried out at The George Washington University.Kathy Benninger is Manager of Networking Research at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
Keeping up on the newest Federal regulations or supporting it appropriately is a full time job even though it is rarely able to be a dedicated position. We will share how a new community of practice on the block is lowering the barrier to entry by elevating the entire community’s regulated research programs through: 1) Building relationships 2) Collecting best practices 3) Opening the dialogue on challenges by broadly sharing lessons learned 4) Aligning with other communities 5) Simplifying compliance 6) Advocating for the community
Regulated Research Community of Practice (RRCoP) is a partner of Trusted CI looking to extend the reach towards research compliance and advocacy of the special circumstances that make research in academic institutions different from industry.
Join us for glimpse of RRCoP roots, recent contributions, lessons learned, and what the future holds.
Speaker Bios: Carolyn Ellis is the CMMC Program Manager at University of California, San Diego, where she builds and leads sustainable regulated research programs. Carolyn has significant experience in grants, research, and implementing the security enclaves for DOD contracts. As leadership of NSF award # 2201028, Building a Community of Practice for Supporting Regulated Research, Carolyn is passionate about growing future leaders within the research compliance community. Her community building efforts also include mentoring within various women in STEM communities such as WiCys (Women in Cybersecurity).
Erik Deumens has a PhD in computational nuclear and chemical physics and has done research in modeling of chemical reactions and designed complex computational software. Since 2011, he is the full time director of the department of Research Computing in UFIT at the University of Florida. Starting 2015, he and his staff have been in charge of a FISMA 800-53 moderate computing environment for research. During 2018 a second generation system was completed to meet both FISMA and CUI 800-171 requirements. The new system has the advantage that it is more cost effective for research budgets. The system was assessed for compliance by a 3PAO. See https:///www.rc.ufl.edu for details on UFIT RC.
The Trusted CI Information Security Office (ISO) team will be presenting a webinar on the CIS Controls. This will include background and information on the CIS controls, our recent experiences using the controls to assess Trusted CI’s own cybersecurity program and operations, and how that can be applied to your own project. Topics include: * Who Trusted CI is and why we have a cybersecurity program. * Background on the CIS controls and what an assessment is. * What led us to perform a CIS assessment. * Overview and discussion of our results. * Differences between control versions 7.1 and 8. * Discussion on methodology and tools that can be used in assessments.
Speaker Bios: Shane Filus serves as a Senior Security Engineer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, and works with Trusted CI, XSEDE/ACCESS, and HuBMAP projects on all aspects of cybersecurity; from operations, to incident response, to policy, and everything in between.
Mark Krenz serves as Chief Security Analyst at Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. Mark’s focus is on cybersecurity operations, research and education. He has more than two decades of experience in system and network administration and has spent the last decade focused on cybersecurity. He serves as the CISO of the ResearchSOC and the Deputy CISO of Trusted CI.
The education industry has unceremoniously emerged as the second most common target for ransomware. It continues to evolve in how it is used as a fund-raiser for criminal organizations and how the technology works, to keep its victims guessing as to defense and eradication. Institutions face the difficult challenge of preserving academic freedom, easy access to information, and open collaboration while defending from threat actors who exploit these same characteristics. This presentation will focus on the current threats and provide guidance on protecting against ransomware attacks.
Speaker Bios: Sarah Bigham: joined the REN-ISAC in March 2014. As Lead Security Analyst, her day-to-day responsibilities include managing the REN-ISAC Blended Threat Workshops, working closely with the National Council of ISACs (NCI), FBI, DHS, and other state and federal peers to stay abreast of new and emerging threats, as well as special projects, and member relations. Before coming to the REN-ISAC, Sarah worked at Harvard University as a Systems Support Specialist focusing on campus-wide Identity & Access Management (IdM) and HIPAA compliance for Harvard University Health Services. Prior to that, Sarah was a defense contractor at the United States Naval Academy where she focused on user and desktop support across the Yard for all faculty, staff, and midshipmen. Sarah holds an Associate of Applied Science in Computer Network Management from Anne Arundel Community College (Annapolis, MD) and a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems Management from University of Maryland Global Campus.
Krysten Stevens joined REN-ISAC as Director of Technical Operations in 2020. She has a background in IT security analysis and cyber threat intelligence from Purdue University, where she used her leadership and expertise to train other security analysts, create security awareness programs, and develop threat intelligence strategies on an organizational level. Krysten graduated from Purdue University Global with an MS Cybersecurity Management in 2020, and she holds CISSP and GCTI certifications. When not at work, Krysten enjoys spending time with her husband, two children, five cats, and two golden retrievers (who refuse to retrieve).
The Trusted CI Framework is a minimum standard for cybersecurity programs. In response to cybersecurity guidance focused narrowly on cybersecurity controls, the Trusted CI Framework provides a more holistic and mission-focused standard for managing cybersecurity. In order to encourage adoption of the Trusted CI Framework, we have created a program called the Framework Cohort, where representatives from multiple NSF Major Facilities and other "Key Projects" participate in a group engagement with Trusted CI focused on adoption and implementation of the Framework.This webinar will provide updates from the inaugural cohort, currently in progress, and discuss the opportunity to participate in future cohorts.More information about the Framework can be found at: https://www.trustedci.org/framework
Speaker Bio: Scott Russell is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. Scott was previously the Postdoctoral Fellow in Information Security Law & Policy. Scott’s work thus far has emphasized private sector cybersecurity best practices, data aggregation and the First and Fourth Amendments, and cybercrime in international law. Scott studied Computer Science and History at the University of Virginia and received his J.D. from the Indiana University, Maurer School of Law.
This webinar presents the results of Trusted CI's 2021 examination of the state of software assurance in scientific computing, and also gives an overview of the contents of its recently released Guide to Securing Scientific Software (GS3), aimed at helping developers of software used in scientific computing improve the security of that software.
See our blog post announcing the report: https://blog.trustedci.org/2021/12/publication-of-trusted-ci-guide-to.html
Speaker Bios: Dr. Elisa Heymann is a Senior Scientist on the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin, and an Associate Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was in charge of the Grid/Cloud security group at the UAB, and participated in two major Grid European Projects: EGI‐InSPIRE and European Middleware Initiative (EMI). Heymann's research interests include security and resource management for Grid and Cloud environments. Her research is supported by the NSF, Spanish government, the European Commission, and NATO.
Prof. Barton Miller is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Amar & Belinder Sohi Professor in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prof. Miller founded the field of fuzz random testing, which is foundational to computer security and software testing. In addition, he founded (with his then-student Prof. Jeffrey Hollingsworth) the field of dynamic binary instrumentation, which is a widely used, critical technology for cyberforensics. Prof. Miller advises the Department of Defense on computer security issues though his position at the Institute for Defense Analysis and was on the Los Alamos National Laboratory Computing, Communications and Networking Division Review Committee and the US Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force (Chicago Area). He is currently an advisor to the Wisconsin Security Research Council. Prof. Miller is a fellow of the ACM.
Dr. Sean Peisert leads applied research and development in computer security at the Berkeley Lab and UC Davis. He is also chief cybersecurity strategist for CENIC; co-lead of Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence; editor-in-chief of IEEE Security & Privacy; a member of the Distinguished Expert Review Panel for the NSA Annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition; a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group; an ACSA Senior Fellow; past chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security & Privacy' and is a steering committee member and past general chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy ("Oakland").
At one time, higher-ed was the requestor of HECVAT's - now we are being called to populate them for our peers. The Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) has become the de facto standard for vendor risk and security assessment in higher education and the number of universities around the globe using the HECVAT in their assessment process is well into the hundreds. As researchers, and those in the academic mission, consume services of academic research providers (e.g., the Ohio Supercomputer Center, OSC), and thus sharing institutional data, their security offices are increasingly conducting security and risk assessment of these providers to ensure they are meeting the risk tolerance of their institution.
Taking a proactive approach to mitigate unnecessary burden in this space, Trusted CI lead an engagement looking to provide response guidance for these academic research service providers on how to properly represent the security state(s) of their environment. Join Kyle Earley, High Performance Computing Security Engineer from the Ohio Supercomputer Center and Charlie Escue, Information Security Manager at Indiana University and co-chair of EDUCAUSE's HECVAT Users Community Group, as they discuss this collaboration and the tangible guidance that was produced during the engagement.
Speaker Bios: Charles Escue manages Indiana University's Extended Information Security (EIS) team, a pioneering effort focused on improving university incident remediation capabilities and the handling of imminent threats, beyond the scope of our traditional security office. With over fourteen years of information technology (IT) experience at Indiana University, Charles proudly leads and contributes his expertise as co-chair of EDUCAUSE's HECVAT Users Community Group.
Kyle Earley serves as the High Performance Computing Security Engineer for the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). He is the single security resource for the center covering everything from day-to-day security operations to specific engagements and audits. Kyle graduated with a bachelor's degree in Management of Information Systems Enterprise Security from Georgia Southern University. Prior to his time at OSC, he worked for Accenture on a wide array of projects from Department of Defense (DoD) contracts to Fortune 500 clients, last serving as a Senior Security Analyst in the consulting track.
Ransomware report: https://hdl.handle.net/2022/26638
Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting researchers (along with hospitals, cities, schools, and utilities) because ransomware allows them to target a broader set of victims. Ransomware monetizes the attack by encrypting data and holding it ransom until victims pay, meaning victims no longer need to hold data of direct financial value. The proliferation of ransomware attacks has led to the U.S. Department of Justice calling it a growing national security threat.
The Physics and Astronomy department at Michigan State University (MSU) suffered a ransomware attack in 2020. The MSU Information Security Office partnered with Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, to investigate the attack and produce a report for the research community on lessons learned.
This webinar by MSU CISO Tom Siu and Trusted CI, will present that report. MSU and Trusted CI will discuss the impact and lessons learned from the attack and offer cybersecurity mitigation strategies for protecting academic researchers. The webinar will conclude with a Q&A session. Audience members are encouraged to ask about their challenges engaging with researchers on the importance of information security.
Speaker Bios: Andrew Adams is the Principal Information Security Officer at Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC) under Carnegie Mellon University, and the Security Manager for the Bridges-2 supercomputer. He also acts as the Chief Information Security Officer for Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. Andrew holds M.S. degrees in both computer science and information science (U. Pittsburgh), and has 20+ years of experience in computer networking research as a previous member of PSC’s Networking Group, including operational responsibilities in the 3ROX GigaPoP. In the field of security, he has designed and developed multiple security oriented systems, performed risk assessments, developed security policies, and has engaged with the open-science community 15+ times to improve their cybersecurity posture. At present, his focus is on methods to keep HPC secure during the pandemic.
Tom Siu joined MSU IT in October 2020 as chief information security officer. As CISO, Tom leads the Security Engineering; Security Operations; Incident Response; and Governance, Risk and Compliance teams within the Information Security department and is responsible for the university-wide information security strategy.
Prior to arriving at MSU, Tom served as CISO for Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) for 14 years where he oversaw the development of the information security program. His notable achievements include the deployment of multifactor authentication and passphrases to all core services for all users, transition to default-deny network posture, creation and operation of a secure research computing enclave, and the development of a highly capable team of information assurance professionals. As a culmination of his time at CWRU, Tom’s team, in combination with colleagues from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, worked to provide a secured operational IT environment for the first 2020 Presidential Debate.
Von Welch is the associate vice president for Information Security and executive director for Cybersecurity Innovation at Indiana University, executive director for the OmniSOC, and the director of IU's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR).
CACR has a unique focus - improve real world cybersecurity for organizations with missions that challenge traditional cybersecurity approaches. Examples include research and development, open science, and highly distributed collaborations. CACR project partners and funders include the US Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, as well as private sector organizations - and Von’s roles span research, development, operations, and leadership.
He specializes in cybersecurity for distributed systems, particularly scientific collaborations and federated identity. His current roles include serving as PI and director for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (Trusted CI), a project dedicated to helping NSF science projects with their cybersecurity needs. He is also PI and director of the Research Security Operations Center (ResearchSOC), a collaborative security response center that addresses the unique cybersecurity concerns of the research community.
The Trusted CI Framework is a tool to help organizations establish and refine their cybersecurity programs. In response to an abundance of guidance focused narrowly on cybersecurity controls, Trusted CI set out to develop a new framework that would empower organizations to confront cybersecurity from a mission-oriented, programmatic, and full organizational lifecycle perspective. The Trusted CI Framework recommends organizations take control of their cybersecurity the same way they would any other important business concern: by adopting a programmatic approach.
This webinar will provide an introduction to the Trusted CI Framework, including a walkthrough of the 16 “Musts” for establishing a competent cybersecurity program. Then we will go on to cover recent developments with the Trusted CI Framework, including: 1. The publication of the first “Framework Implementation Guide,” which provides in-depth guidance on how to implement each Framework Must; 2. The experiences of NOIRLab (NSF Major Facility) as the first official Framework adopter; and 3. The announcement of the “Framework Cohort” for 2022, an initiative to help Major Facilities adopt and implement the Framework.
Speaker Bio: Scott Russell is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. Scott was previously the Postdoctoral Fellow in Information Security Law & Policy. Scott’s work thus far has emphasized private sector cybersecurity best practices, data aggregation and the First and Fourth Amendments, and cybercrime in international law. Scott studied Computer Science and History at the University of Virginia and received his J.D. from the Indiana University, Maurer School of Law.
Q-Factor is a framework to enable data transfer optimization based on real-time network state information provided by programmable data planes. Communication networks are critical components of today’s scientific workflows. Researchers leverage long-distance ultra-high-speed networks to transfer massive data sets from acquisition sites to processing sites and share measurements with scientists worldwide. However, while network bandwidth is continuously increasing, most data transfers are unable to efficiently utilize the added capacity due to inherent limitations of parameter settings of the network transport protocols and the lack of network state information at the end hosts. To address these challenges, Q-Factor plans to use sub-second network state data to dynamically configure current transport protocol and operating systems parameters to reach higher network utilization and, as a result, to improve scientific workflows. Q-Factor leverages programmable network devices with the In-band Network Telemetry (INT) framework and delivers a software solution to process in-band measurements at the end hosts. Using Q-Factor on end hots, for instance Data Transfer Nodes (DTN)s, TCP/IP parameters will be configured according to temporal network characteristics, such as round-trip time, network utilization, and network buffer occupancy. This tuning is expected to increase network utilization, shorter flow completion times, and significantly reduce packet drops caused by under-provisioned network buffers. Q-Factor is a collaboration between Florida International University and Energy Science Network.
Speaker Bio: Jeronimo Bezerra is the FIU’s Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment’s IT Associate Director. Jeronimo has 19 years of IT and Network Engineering experience, most of them with R&E networks. He is responsible for AmLight network operation and engineering, including the SDN deployment and operation. He is leading the Q-Factor design, development and deployment activities.
As the demand for research computing dealing with sensitive data increases, institutions like the National Center for Supercomputing Applications work to build the infrastructure that can process and store these types of data. Along with the infrastructure can come a host of regulatory obligations including auditing and examination requirements. We will present NCSA’s recent SOC2 examination of its healthcare computing infrastructure and how we ensured our controls, data collection and processes were properly documented, tested and poised for the examination. Additionally, we will show how other research and educational organizations might handle a SOC2 examination and what to expect from such an examination. From a broader perspective, the techniques and lessons learned can be applied to much more than a SOC2 examination and could potentially be used to save time and resources for any audit or examination.
Speaker Bio: Alex Withers is an Assistant Director for Cyber Security and the Chief Information Security Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Additionally, he is the security co-manager for the XSEDE project and NCSA’s HIPAA Security Liaison. He is also a PI and co-PI for a number of NSF-funded cybersecurity projects.
The OSG Consortium provides researchers with the ability to bring their distributed high throughput computing (dHTC) workloads to a pool of resources consisting of hardware across approximately 100 different sites. Using this “Open Science Pool” resource, projects can leverage the opportunistic access (nodes that would be otherwise idle at the site), dedicated hardware, or allocated time at large-scallel NSF-funded resources.
While dHTC can be a powerful tool to advance scientific discovery, managing trust relationships with so many sites can be challenging; the OSG helps bootstrap the trust relationships between project and provider. Further, authorization in the OSG ecosystem is an evolving topic. On the national and international infrastructure, we are leading the transition from identity-based authorization -- basing decisions on “who you are” -- to capability based authorization. Capability-based authorization focuses on “what can you do?” and is implemented through tools like bearer tokens. Changing the mindset of an entire ecosystem is wide-ranging work, involving dedicated projects such as the new NSF-funded “SciAuth” and international partners like the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
In this talk, we’ll cover the journey of the OSG to a capability-based authorization as well as the challenges and opportunities of changing trust models for a functioning infrastructure.
Speaker Bio: Brian Bockelman is a Principal Investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and co-PI on the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) and Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP). Within the OSG, he leads the Technology Area, which provides the software and technologies that underpin the OSG fabric of services. He is also a co-PI on the new SciAuth project, led by Jim Basney, which aims to coordinate the deployment of capability-based authorization across the science and engineering cyberinfrastructure.
Before joining Morgridge, Bockelman received a joint PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and was an integral member of the Holland Computing Center at UNL. His team helps advance Research Computing activities at Morgridge and are partners within the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Secure development is not just a technical problem: it’s a human and organizational problem as well. To understand the causes of insecurity, and find effective solutions, we must understand how and why security problems happen, and what barriers stand in the way of fixing them. How can we make it easier for developers to write secure code, even without special training? In this talk, I will report on findings from several recent studies addressing these questions. These include examining the effects of information resources and API design on developers' likelihood of writing secure code; using data from a secure programming contest to explore the kinds of security mistakes developers make; and exploring the benefits and barriers associated with adoption of a secure programming language.
Speaker Bio: Michelle Mazurek is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also directs the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. Her research aims to understand and improve the human elements of security- and privacy-related decision making. Recent projects include examining how and why developers make security and privacy mistakes; investigating the vulnerability-discovery process; evaluating the use of threat-modeling in large-scale organizations; and analyzing how users learn about and decide whether to adopt security advice. Her work has been recognized with an NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper award and three USENIX Security Distinguished Paper awards. She was Program Chair for the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) for 2019 and 2020 and is Program Chair for the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) for 2022 and 2023.
The scientific cyberinfrastructure community heavily relies on public internet-based systems (e.g., GitHub) to share resources and collaborate. GitHub is one of the most powerful and popular systems for open source collaboration that allows users to share and work on projects in a public space for accelerated development and deployment. Monitoring GitHub for exposed vulnerabilities can save financial cost and prevent misuse and attacks of cyberinfrastructure. Vulnerability scanners that can interface with GitHub directly can be leveraged to conduct such monitoring. This research aims to proactively identify vulnerable communities within scientific cyberinfrastructure. We use social network analysis to construct graphs representing the relationships amongst users and repositories. We leverage prevailing unsupervised graph embedding algorithms to generate graph embeddings that capture the network attributes and nodal features of our repository and user graphs. This enables the clustering of public cyberinfrastructure repositories and users that have similar network attributes and vulnerabilities. Results of this research find that major scientific cyberinfrastructures have vulnerabilities pertaining to secret leakage and insecure coding practices for high-impact genomics research. These results can help organizations address their vulnerable repositories and users in a targeted manner.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Sagar Samtani is an Assistant Professor and Grant Thornton Scholar in the Department of Operations and Decision Technologies at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (2020 – Present). He is also a Fellow within the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) at IU. Samtani graduated with his Ph.D. in May 2018 from the Artificial Intelligence Lab in University of Arizona’s Management Information Systems (MIS) department from the University of Arizona (UArizona). He also earned his MS in MIS and BSBA in 2014 and 2013, respectively, from UArizona. From 2014 – 2017, Samtani served as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarship-for-Service (SFS) Fellow.
Samtani’s research centers around Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for Cybersecurity and cyber threat intelligence (CTI). Selected recent topics include deep learning, network science, and text mining approaches for smart vulnerability assessment, scientific cyberinfrastructure security, and Dark Web analytics. Samtani has published over two dozen journal and conference papers on these topics in leading venues such as MIS Quarterly, JMIS, ACM TOPS, IEEE IS, Computers and Security, IEEE Security and Privacy, and others. His research has received nearly $1.8M (in PI and Co-PI roles) from the NSF CICI, CRII, and SaTC-EDU programs.
He also serves as a Program Committee member or Program Chair of leading AI for cybersecurity and CTI conferences and workshops, including IEEE S&P Deep Learning Workshop, USENIX ScAINet, ACM CCS AISec, IEEE ISI, IEEE ICDM, and others. He has also served as a Guest Editor on topics pertaining to AI for Cybersecurity at IEEE TDSC and other leading journals. Samtani has won several awards for his research and teaching efforts, including the ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation award in 2019. Samtani has received media attention from outlets such as Miami Herald, Fox, Science Magazine, AAAS, and the Penny Hoarder. He is a member of AIS, ACM, IEEE, INFORMS, and INNS.
Drawing upon its mission to enable access to discovery and scholarship, Arizona State University is deploying an advanced research network employing the Science DMZ architecture. While advancing knowledge of managing 21st-century cyberinfrastructure in a large public research university, this project also advances how network cyberinfrastructure supports research and education in science, engineering, and health.
Replacing existing edge network equipment and installing an optimized, tuned Data Transfer Node provides a friction-free wide area network path and streamlined research data movement. A strict router access control list and intrusion detection system provide security within the Science DMZ, and end-to-end network performance measurement via perfSONAR guards against issues such as packet loss.
Recognizing that the operation of the Science DMZ must not compromise the university’s network security profile, while at the same time avoiding the performance penalty associated with perimeter firewall devices, data access and transfer services will be protected by access control lists on the Science DMZ border router as well as host-level security measures. Additionally, the system architecture employs the anti-IP spoofing tool Spoofer, the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) Zeek, data-sharing honeypot tool STINGAR, traditional honeypot/darknet/tarpit tools, as well as other open-source software.
Finally, Science data flows are supported by a process incorporating user engagement, iterative technical improvements, training, documentation, and follow-up.
Speaker Bios:
Douglas Jennewein is Senior Director for Research Computing in the Research Technology Office at Arizona State University. He has supported computational and data-enabled science since 2003 when he built his first supercomputer from a collection of surplus-bound PCs. He currently architects, funds, and deploys research cyberinfrastructure including advanced networks, supercomputers, and big data archives. He has also served on the NSF XSEDE Campus Champions Leadership Team since 2016 and has chaired that group since 2020. Jennewein is a certified Software Carpentry instructor and has successfully directed cyberinfrastructure projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of Agriculture totaling over $4M.
Chris Kurtz is the Senior Systems Architect for the Research Technology Office in the Office of Knowledge Enterprise at Arizona State University. Previously Chris was the Director of Public Cloud Engineering as well as the Splunk System Architect (and Evangelist) at ASU. He has been appointed as Splunk Trust Community MVP since its inception. Chris is a regular speaker on Splunk and Higher Education, including multiple presentations at Educause, Educause Security Professionals, and Splunk’s yearly “.conf" Conference. Prior to architecting Splunk, he was the Systems Manager of the Mars Space Flight Facility at ASU, a NASA/JPL funded research group, where he supported numerous Mars Missions including TES, THEMIS, and the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. Chris lives in Mesa, Arizona along with his wife, rescue dogs, and cat.
We have a bonus podcast episode, it is brought to us by our partners at the ReserachSOC.
In March of this year, Trusted CI published its Framework Implementation Guide for Research Cyberinfrastructure Operators.
In this podcast episode, Craig Jackson, architect of the Trusted CI Framework and Susan Sons, Deputy Director of Research SOC, discuss how to use the Framework to enhance relationships with key stakeholders while driving forward action to improve the overall cybersecurity posture of an organization.
You can learn more about the Framework at trustedci.org/framework, or the ResearchSOC at researchsoc.iu.edu.
In January 2016 we announced that CTSC was named NSF's Cybersecurity of Excellence. Its role is to provide readily available cybersecurity services tailored to the NSF science community. With this in mind, we are announcing the CCoE Webinar Series. The kickoff presentation will be presented by members of the CTSC Leadership Team and focuses on who we are, our activities, projects, and areas we can assist the community. Presentations will be recorded and include time for questions with the audience.
This talk will present a self-evaluation spreadsheet which can be used by projects to make an initial assessment of their cybersecurity readiness. The spreadsheet is based on the “Securing Commodity IT in Scientific CI Projects” document available as part of CTSC’s Guide to Developing Cybersecurity Programs for NSF Science and Engineering Projects.
More information can be found at: http://trustedci.org/guide
This talk is presented by CTSC's Terry Fleury
The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. This session will provide an overview of the XSEDE information security program used to protect information and assets for the $121 million dollar project. Focus areas will include information sharing, policies and procedures, incident response and security awareness training.
This talk is presented by CTSC's James Marsteller.
The Science DMZ architecture proposes a novel method of design for network segments optimized for large scale data transfer (LSDT) functionality. LSDT has special requirements, both in the security and functional arenas. Attempts to incorporate LSDT functionality into a more traditional perimeter security model can cause problems both with LSDT functionality, as well as weaken overall campus security. The Science DMZ attempts to solve this problem by segmenting the LSDT function away from the traditional campus security perimeter. However, insufficient attention has been paid thus far as to how the Science DMZ fits into a larger strategy of risk-based segmentation and functional maximization of campus networks.
This presentation examines typical risk and control-based security approaches and proposes a framework in which the Science DMZ, combined with a larger segmentation approach, actually improves the security of valuable campus information assets, while still maximizing LSDT function and security. It concludes with some examples as to how the security of the research enterprise can be vastly improved with a Science DMZ deployment that is carefully aligned with a segmentation strategy.
This talk is presented by Energy Science Network's (ESnet) Michael Sinatra.
Open Source, as a development methodology has revolutionized how we innovate, how we develop, and how we consume software. Now, any cutting edge technology software is presumed to be open source. So what does software methodology have to learn from 19th century economics of farming? Unfortunately quite a lot. While the open source methodology allows tremendous speed in the rate of innovation; but all too frequently we consume without any idea of how well software is maintained. This has led us to unhappy situations where we find that the most heavily used encryption library in the world, was maintained by 4 people, in their spare time. Or the incredibly important GPG suite of tools - was maintained by two people, one of whom was an intern. Of course these aren't new problems, but how do we solve them without experiencing a tragedy of the commons.
This talk is presented by Apache Software Foundation's David Nalley.
In my long career in science-related IT, I've seen security go from a non-issue to a big issue. I'll first relate a few security anecdotes from that career, including founding this series of summits. Then I'll describe some conclusions I've come to about this pesky subject. Finally, I'll outline the security research strategic plan created by the interagency NITRD program's senior steering group for computer security and information assurance.
This talk is presented by George Strawn of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
Our last webinar episode of the first season is a group presentation on the CICI Regional Cybersecurity Collaboration projects. The presenters and project names are: * Xinwen Fu, New England Cybersecurity Operation and Research Center (CORE) * James Joshi & Brian Stengel, SAC-PA: Towards Security Assured Cyberinfrastructure in Pennsylvania * Jaroslav Flidr, Substrate for Cybersecurity Education; a Platform for Training, Research and Experimentation (SCEPTRE) * Jill Gemmill, SouthEast SciEntific Cybersecurity for University REsearch (SouthEast SECURE)
Anita Nikolich from NSF will provide an introduction to the NSF CICI program.
New England Cybersecurity Operation and Research Center (CORE)CORE Project Web SitePresenter: Xinwen Fu (University of Massachusetts Lowell)The New England Cybersecurity Operation and Research Center (CORE) is a collaboration between cybersecurity researchers and networking experts from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Information Technology (IT) support personnel and leadership from the Office of the President of University of Massachusetts (UMass), who work together to improve the security of under-resourced institutions in New England and providing a model of a regional approach to cybersecurity. The researchers have established an open cybersecurity program at UMass, which guides customers through a sequence of steps and selects security controls and technologies from both proprietary solutions and free open source solutions, considering the budget of the institution or enterprise that wants to protect their assets. This project also performs research on emerging threats, trends and defense based on the collected data.
SAC-PA: Towards Security Assured Cyberinfrastructure in Pennsylvania
Presenters: James Joshi & Brian Stengel (University of Pittsburgh)Cybersecurity is a growing concern for individuals, communities, nations and the world. Increasing cyberattacks make cybersecurity a critical national security concern. Information technology provides tremendous opportunities to accelerate data-driven scientific research and education. Increasing cybersecurity problems can adversely impact the research and its economic and social benefits if our cyberinfrastructure that supports scientific research and education is not well protected. Beyond innovative cybersecurity solutions, it is critical to establish structured and effective practices and better collaboration among various stakeholders to share cybersecurity resources, expertise and information. This project focuses on establishing a regional collaboration and partnership within the state of Pennsylvania, referred to as SAC-PA. SAC-PA will provide critical support to smaller academic institutions (schools and colleges, etc.) including resource constrained regional institutions that serve under-represented groups, females and high school teachers and students. It will establish a collaboration and partnership framework to enable concerted activities promoting the use of effective cybersecurity techniques and practice of security-assured cyberinfrastructure. While enhancing the cybersecurity posture of PA, SAC-PA will provide a regional cybersecurity collaboration and partnership model that can be adopted by other regions, or be extended for national level collaborations. The SAC-PA project will include participation from the public-private sectors and academic institutions in PA in the following key activities: (i) developing and delivering three regional workshops in Pittsburgh to bring together various regional stakeholders from scientific research related communities with cyberinfrastructure or cybersecurity resources to better understand the regional capabilities; explore existing and emerging cybersecurity challenges/solutions; and devise collaboration and partnerships to enable concerted cybersecurity activities to promote the use of effective cybersecurity techniques and practices; (ii) collaboratively developing training/awareness materials based on the needs and capabilities identified in the workshops, and sharing these extensively with regional partners and beyond through various channels; and (iii) establishing regional partnerships and a shared repository of cybersecurity resources/capabilities to facilitate collaborative and concerted efforts towards protecting scientific cyberinfrastructures.
Substrate for Cybersecurity Education; a Platform for Training, Research and Experimentation (SCEPTRE)
Presenter: Jaroslav Flidr (The George Washington University)In collaboration with the Michigan Cyber Range (MCR) facility operated by Merit Network, and the Cyber Academy operated by the College of Professional Studies (CPS) at the George Washington University, the project proposes to establish and deploy an open and flexible technology platform for broad-context cybersecurity education and hands-on training. Initially, the platform will be used in developing and delivering a credit bearing Practicum (2 credit hours) that addresses “Intrusion Detection and Remediation.” The course will be transferable toward the undergraduate certificate in Protection and Defense of Computer Networks, which is part of the Bachelor’s degree completion in cybersecurity. The practicum is a hands-on training that will cover a broad range of network intrusion, prevention, and detection techniques such as implementation and testing of IDS security plans, security monitoring, intrusion detection, alarm management, analysis of events and trends, and vulnerability management. The program will utilize a high-performance, flexible environment built on Cisco’s UCS hardware platform with a modified OpenStack framework. This multi-tenant system, originally developed under an NSF grant, will facilitate the full integration of the Cyber Academy with the MCR resources. Thanks to its virtual nature and its tight coupling with physical cyberinfrastructure components such as HPC, cluster storage arrays, public and private clouds, 100G optical networks, and a wide variety of SDN technologies, the system will be able to deploy nearly any cybersecurity scenario, on demand. The program will start enrolling students immediately after making the platform operational.
Collaborative Research: CICI: Regional: SouthEast SciEntific Cybersecurity for University REsearch (SouthEast SECURE)
Presenter: Jill Gemmill (Clemson)The SouthEast SciEntific Cybersecurity for University REsearch (SECURE) project helps protect the National Science Foundation's investments in scientific research while providing scientists with tools to safeguard intellectual property and ensure data integrity. The project team provides education, training, and selected cybersecurity services to NSF-funded researchers across the Southeast. The team is multidisciplinary, comprised of cybersecurity experts (both research and practitioner), scientists, and experts in communication. Team members are located in South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, with strong representation from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). This program raises investigators' awareness of their essential role in creating a secure and trustworthy cyberspace and offers concrete assistance in risk assessment, vulnerability testing, and mitigation tailored to NSF-funded scientists? workflow and program size. Through past collaborations, the team is well positioned to leverage both national and regional cybersecurity organizations and programs to effectively reach the target audience.SouthEast SECURE impacts the region by raising cybersecurity awareness; providing concise training, assessment, tools and one-on-one help; and assisting in preparation of select cybersecurity metrics. Student interns are conducting many of these activities by means of practicum-based deployment and support, thus developing capabilities in the next generation of cyber professionals. An online survey of NSF-funded investigators in the region will be conducted to learn about their primary cybersecurity challenges and concerns. Training is then tailored to provide concrete and practical assistance in how to do right-sized risk assessment and mitigation. A "toolkit" is provided to test and validate local cybersecurity, and measures of cybersecurity are created and field-tested. The team's approach facilitates communication between research faculty and university IT/Data Security staff. A long-term goal is building communities with common interests in cybersecurity and a commitment to helping others; and building connections with other regions and with national centers and programs.
The Open Science Cyber Risk Profile (OSCRP) is a joint project of the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). Over the course of 2016, the CTSC and ESnet organized a working group of research and education community leaders to develop a risk profile for open science. The risk profile is a categorization of scientific assets and their common risks to science to greatly expedite risk management for open science projects and improve their cybersecurity. The working group released the a draft of the OSCRP for public comment in late 2016.
This talk is presented by Von Welch and Sean Peisert.
Based on CTSC’s cybersecurity program development guide (see trustedci.org/guide), this webinar addresses practical information security tasks for small and medium science projects. The NSF CCoE’s work spans the full range of NSF-funded projects and facilities, and cybersecurity is certainly not a one-size-fits-all endeavor.
Some of the topics covered include: Cybersecurity’s relevance to science projects. The complexity and scope of cybersecurity, and how cybersecurity programs can help you cope with that complexity (and protect your science). A handful of “must-do” (and doable!) action items. This session is appropriate for principal investigators, program officers, IT professionals in research and higher education, research facility managers, and security professionals interested in information security approaches tailored to particular communities. It is not a detailed technical training. There will be significant opportunities for Q&A.
This talk is presented by Susan Sons, Craig Jackson, and Bob Cowles.
Over the past 4 years, Duke has established SDN bypass networks, an SDN mediated Science DMZ, and other services that rely on identity data about the users and the equipment at Duke. One such service is the Protected Research and Data Network (PRDN), which makes use of our Identity Management (IDM) services both for Duke researchers and their collaborators at other institutions.
In this presentation we will discuss the path that Duke took to implement our network, link the various pieces together and the security model used to protect the network and detect unusual activity. Web based access to services provided inside of our PRDN allow for simple implementation of multi-factor authentication and we will present some novel methods for providing access to both Windows and Linux services inside of a browser. We will also discuss Plexus, our Ryu based SDN controller, and our plans around the firewall/proxy management application, Locutus, that allows us to support multiple controllers in different spaces of our network (alternative to flow space firewall). A short discussion of our ability to integrate with GENI/exoGENI sevices, AL2S, and our regional SDN project will be included.
This talk is presented by Duke University's Richard Biever and Charley Kneifel.
Please register here. Be sure to check spam/junk folder for registration confirmation with attached calendar file. With cyberattacks and breaches rising exponentially, there is increasing pressure on federally funded scientific and academic institutions to protect regulated data, including identifiable patient data protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and data collected or processed on behalf of the government, which is subject to the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA). Each comes with its own set of cybersecurity requirements, including physical, administrative, technical controls, to be applied using a risk-centric approach. FISMA specifies the risk methodology to use, namely the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Management Framework (RMF), but still provides considerable latitude in how it can be deployed. HIPAA leaves the choice entirely to the practitioner. Organizations are also allowed by both regulations to tailor implementation to fit their size, budget, risk tolerance, etc. This provides great flexibility, but the flexibility comes at a cost. Without prescriptive checklists and tools from the government, interpreting the regulations can be a nightmare, especially for the newly initiated. Commercial expertise comes at a premium, and may even be beyond reach due to budget. Fortunately, the news is not all bad. Cybersecurity has seen great improvements in the scientific and academic community in recent years, with a majority of required controls in place already. Remaining obstacles generally are policies and procedures, risk assessment, mitigation, and, most of all, documentation. While these take time and effort, the bulk is limited to initial implementation, with considerable gains in security and efficiency. To illustrate this, this webinar will feature two institutions, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Indiana University (IU). They will share their stories of how they faced and overcame the FISMA and HIPAA challenges in their research computing environments, and benefited. The webinar will also touch upon the basics of HIPAA and FISMA, the NIST RMF, and how it can be leveraged for HIPAA and FISMA and other types of cyber compliance.
This talk is presented by Susan Ramsey and Anurag Shankar.
"" on May 22nd at 11am (Eastern).
Please register here. Be sure to check spam/junk folder for registration confirmation with attached calendar file. The U.S. National Science Foundation Transition To Practice (TTP) program is critical to the successful deployment and realization of value for NSF-funded cybersecurity research. Transition to Practice has been named a priority by the National Science and Technology Council’s subcommittee on Network and Information Technology Research Development (NITRD), since 2011, as the participating agencies recognize the need to see funded research adopted by the operational community and ultimately make a positive impact on society. Currently, a chasm exists between the output of the academic cybersecurity research community, and the operational Information Technology (IT) community, which acquires system prototypes that often result from later stage academic research components and implements them in operational environments as either proofs of concept or in operations. The goal of the NSF TTP program is to enable NSF-funded cybersecurity research to cross this chasm and become an operationalized asset to add value in our nation’s cybersecurity efforts. Internet2 Collaborative Innovation Community (CINC UP): Cybersecurity Research Transition to Practice Acceleration Opportunities (Emily Nichols) Internet2 is leading an NSF funded EAGER project to benefit members as together we develop a comprehensive TTP program with the goal of enabling as many NSF cybersecurity grants as possible to transition to practice in an accelerated fashion. Please join us to discuss how together the Internet2 community of NSF funded cybersecurity researchers, IT operations, and institutions including universities, labs, industry members and affiliates can work together to enable the application of cybersecurity research. NSF's SATC TTP Ecosystem (Dr. Alec Yasinsac) NSF is offering substantial resources to support TTP efforts, including TTP training for PIs, match-making services, mentoring services, a best-practices repository, and software development resources. A key resource is the SaTC (Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace) TTP designation. PIs that have mature research results can apply for three year awards up to $500k or four year projects up to $1.2m exclusively to conduct TTP activities. In this presentation, we will present the case for TTP, identify the unique aspects of the TTP Designation in the SaTC Solicitation, and will describe elements of the anticipated TTP ecosystem. This talk is relevant for academics of all rank, to research scientists in government and academic laboratories, and industry members that are interested in harvesting NSF-funded cybersecurity research
Provenance meta-data, also known as data pedigree, is a set of data that explains how information was derived. A number of provenance systems exist. They are useful for finding the sources of errors; allowing system users to have confidence in the materials; and potentially providing legal justification for decisions. An open issue has been how to properly secure this meta-data, in a manner that extends beyond trusting the information providers. Blockchain technology provides a universally accessible ledger of transactions that is the basis of the current generation of crypto-currencies. The blockchain structure provides guarantees of system integrity that make it exceedingly difficult for malicious insiders to tamper with data. Our project adapts blockchain concepts to securing provenance meta-data. The talk we present will include the following topics:
- A brief survey of provenance systems that discusses security needs;
- The presentation of three illustrative use-cases that motivate the development of a provenance security framework;
- A short tutorial on the structure of the blockchain; A brief overview of the current generation of crypto-currencies;
- An explanation of what aspects of crypto-currencies are ill-suited to our application;
- An overview of our system architecture, emphasizing two important points:
- Our ability to integrate existing tools, and
- The portions of the system that we are developing;
- A discussion of our current status; and Plans for the next phase.
This talk is presented by Dr. Richard Brooks and Dr. Tony Skjellum.
Please register here. Be sure to check spam/junk folder for registration confirmation with attached calendar file. The presentation will cover the introduction of a security program to protect the national R&E network operated by Internet2. Discussed will the methodology to conduct a security risk assessment of the network, the findings from the assessment, and specific improvements undertaken.
This talk is presented by Internet2's Paul Howell.
Passwords are an infamous bottleneck of information security: The users choose them badly and then forget them, and the servers store (at best!) a table of password hashes which, in the all-too-common event that the server is hacked, allows the attacker to recover a large fraction of the passwords using the so-called Offline Dictionary Attack. At the same time, we seem to be stuck with passwords because they form the most user-friendly authentication mechanism we know. Our work in the CICI-sponsored project looks at the security vulnerabilities of current password authentication protocols, including Two-Factor authentication protocols, where the user's password is amended by the presence of an Auxiliary Authentication Device, e.g. a cell-phone capable of displaying a short one-time PIN which the user copies onto her terminal in order to authenticate to the server. We show that with modest changes to the authentication infrastructure, involving either the user's client, or the authentication server, or the Auxiliary Device software, we can make password authentication protocols which are as practical as currently used schemes but have much stroger security properties. Most importantly, the schemes we show eliminate the security vulnerability posed by the server storing password hashes, thus eliminating the possibility of the Offline Dictionary Attack in case of server compromise. In other properties, our schemes offer resistance to so-called phishing attacks and, more generally, failures in the Public Key Infrastructure, where the user misidentifies the public key of the authentication server and, which in current password authentication schemes leads to revealing the user's password to the adversary.
In this presentation we will present an overview of our work on strengthening password and two-factor schemes, published in NDSS'14, Asiacrypt'14, EuroSP'16, AsiaCCS'16, ACNS'17, ICDCS'17, as well as future directions.
This talk is presented by UC Irvine's Stanislaw Jarecki.
One of CTSC's core activities is conducting one-on-one engagements with NSF projects and facilities. CTSC has recently launched its call for applications for engagements in 2018, due October 2nd. This presentation will review the benefits and scope of CTSC engagements, as well as the application process. Webinar attendees are encouraged to attend live to ask questions about their project/application.
More information about engagements and the application can be found at: https://trustedci.org/application
This talk is presented by CTSC Director, Von Welch. *Note, CTSC was renamed Trusted CI in 2018.
Threat intelligence has become a very popular keyword among security professionals in the recent years. What is this all about? Is this a service for sale or rather an intangible asset resulting from a trust relationship? Every organization is seeking relevant and target intelligence, ideally at little to no cost and yielding no false-positives. What are the myths and realities? Is threat intelligence a worthy investment? Is it more suitable to favor local or global sources? Are there services or tools that can facilitate threat intelligence management. Beyond obtaining information, an often overlooked aspect are the challenges linked with building the ability to take promptly and effectively action based on specific intelligence. Making good use of threat intelligence is what makes its value, but this requires time and efforts. Yet, a well-designed threat intelligence management and flow may in fact be the only realistic and affordable strategy for our community to mitigate sophisticated threats or well-funded attackers on a daily basis.
This talk presents various aspects and challenges of monitoring and security of a big research network while keeping it open and usable.
We focus on issues faced due to following attributes: 1. Decentralization 2. High Speed 3. BYOD policy 4. Openness
We further provide insights into our detection and incident response process using some real world examples and how above attributes influence this process.
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although the blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using Blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records using off-chain techniques. In this talk, we discuss how we leverage Blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and management. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance model (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed framework can securely capture and validate provenance data that prevents any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the majority of the participants are honest.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Kantarcioglu is a Professor in the Computer Science Department and Director of the Data Security and Privacy Lab at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Dr. Kantarcioglu’s research focuses on the integration of cyber security and data science.Presentations are recorded and include time for questions with the audience.
In this talk, we are presenting our work on building a data quality and security (DQS) framework, which integrates cybersecurity with other diverse metrics, such as accuracy, reliability, timeliness, and safety into a single methodological and technological framework. This innovation has a high potential to enable a significant improvement in a wide spectrum of science and technology applications as it will create new opportunities for optimizing data structures, data processing and fusion procedures based on a new quality and security information application. While the developed evaluation techniques may cover a wide range of data sources, the current framework’s implementation concentrates on using an ordinary user’s owned mobile devices and Android-based smartphones in particular.
After discussing a motivation and general concepts of data quality evaluation, we will present preliminary results. As the framework integrates various metrics from accuracy to security and privacy, we will show examples of cyberinfrastructure elements from those areas developed so far. The security evaluation aspect of the framework is introduced with the Android applications that evaluate a smartphone security, gives a comprehensive score, and advises how the smartphone security can be improved. Two applications that are already available on Google Play will be presented and discussed. In addition, we will show some examples of the framework’s user interface designed for data quality metrics assignment and demonstrate its visualization capabilities.
The data privacy evaluation is presented with the investigation of the colluded application vulnerability in Android OS devices. We will discuss and analyze the results achieved in this domain.
We believe that DQS evaluation framework will stimulate further improvement of the quality of the whole cyberinfrastructure and, in particular, cybersecurity. We will discuss possible further developments and seek the feedback and advice on the further DQS evaluation research directions. In particular, we are looking for a collaboration in the development of our framework applications in various science and technology domains.
Speaker Bios: Leon Reznik is a Professor of Computer Science (primary affiliation) and Computing Security (secondary affiliation) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His current research concentrates on data quality and security evaluation and assurance; cognitive sensor networks and systems; intelligent intrusion detection and big data analytics.
Igor Khokhlov is a Ph.D. candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He conducts research on data quality and value evaluation for sensor-originated data. Igor’s fields of interest include Android OS, cyber-security, and AI.
Data-intensive science collaborations increasingly provision dedicated network circuits to share and exchange datasets securely at high speed, leveraging national-footprint research fabrics such as ESnet or I2/AL2S. This talk first gives an overview of new features to automate circuit interconnection of science resources across campuses and in network cloud testbeds, such as GENI (e.g., ExoGENI) and NSFCloud (e.g., Chameleon). Taken together, these tools can enable science teams to deploy secure bandwidth-provisioned virtual science networks that link multiple campuses and/or virtual testbed slices, with integrated in-network processing on virtual cloud servers.
Next, we outline a software framework to address security issues arising in these virtual science networks. We show how to deploy virtual science networks with integrated security management programmatically, using software-defined networking and network function virtualization (SDN/NFV). As an example, we describe a prototype virtual Network Service Provider that implements SDX-like functionality for policy-based interconnection of its customers, and incorporates out-of-band monitoring of permitted flows using Bro intrusion detection instances hosted on cloud VMs. We also describe how to use a new logical trust system called SAFE to express and enforce access policies for edge peering and permitted flows, and to validate IP prefix ownership and routing authority (modeling RPKI and BGPSEC protocols) in virtual science networks.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. (ACI-1642140, ACI-1642142, CNS-1330659, CNS-1243315) and through the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
Speaker Bios: Jeffrey S. Chase is a Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. He joined Duke in 1995 after receiving his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington (Seattle). He was an early leader in automated management for cluster services, cloud hosting systems, and server energy management. He served as an architect in NSF’s GENI project and is a principal of ExoGENI, a multi-campus networked cloud testbed.
Paul Ruth is a Senior Research Scientist at RENCI-UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2007. He has been a primary contributor to the ExoGENI testbed since 2011 and is currently the networking lead for the NSF Chameleon testbed.
Please register here. Be sure to check spam/junk folder for registration confirmation email. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is slated to come into effect on May 25, 2018, and organizations around the world are struggling to determine whether they are covered, what is required, and what will happen if they don’t satisfy its requirements.
This webinar will provide an introduction to GDPR, including an overview of the law's requirements, an in-depth discussion of when and to whom the law may apply, and potential strategies for organizations that are unsure of whether they are covered. The webinar will also provide insight into the motivation behind the law, the legal and practical ramifications of its enforcement outside of the EU, and highlight current uncertainties relating to the scope and impact of the law. Attendees will leave with an improved understanding of how GDPR may impact their organization, and will be equipped with basic strategies to manage risks arising from the enforcement of the law.
This webinar is a product of the Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. Trusted CI is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number ACI-1547272. For more information about the Trusted CI please visit: http://trustedci.org/. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Speaker Bio: Scott Russell is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR), where his work focuses on privacy and cybersecurity policy. A lawyer and researcher, Scott received his B.A. in Computer Science and History from the University of Virginia, received his J.D. from Indiana University, interned at MITRE, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at CACR.
The concept behind the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is simple: conduct a digital image-based survey over an enormous area of the sky and build an extensive astronomical catalogue over the course of ten years. LSST’s astronomical data is the ultimate deliverable to its users. This unique scientific computing environment presents many cyber security challenges. LSST has in place a cyber security program to facilitate its scientific mission: to protect its data access requirements and rights. We will discuss the beginnings of LSST’s cyber security program, adoption and experience with its risk management framework, existing and planned security operations at LSST sites, including the observatory site in Chile and the National Center for Supercomputing Operations (NCSA).
Speaker Bio: Alex is a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He is the Information Security Officer for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). He is also a PI and co-PI for a number of NSF-funded cybersecurity projects.
There has been an unprecedented increase in the quantity of research data available in digital form. Combining these information sources within analyses that leverage cloud computing frameworks and big data analytics platforms has the potential to lead to groundbreaking innovations and scientific insights. As developers and operators of the widely used Dataverse repository and the Massachusetts Open Cloud platform, we have been working to advance this innovative revolution by colocating datasets in common platforms, curating and tagging datasets with both functional and legal access policies, offering helper services such as search and easy citation to promote sharing, and providing on-demand computational platforms to ease analytics. Unfortunately, we observe that a certain segment of our scientific user base cannot enjoy the full transformative capacity achievable within our cyberinfrastructure. Due to concerns over the privacy and confidentiality of their data sources, or the potential of commercial exploitation of their raw data sets, these researchers are isolating themselves within siloed data repositories and well-protected computational enclaves rather than sharing their datasets with fellow scientists.
This talk will describe cryptographic technological enhancements that are ready to provide scientific researchers with mechanisms to do collaborative analytics over their datasets while keeping those datasets protected and confidential. Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a cryptographic technology that allows independent organizations to compute an analytic jointly over their data in such a manner that nobody learns anything other than the desired output. Hence, MPC empowers organizations to make their data available for collective data aggregation and analysis while still adhering to pre-existing confidentiality constraints, legal restrictions, or corporate policies governing data sharing. Our new Conclave framework can connect to many existing backend stacks where the data already live, can automatically analyze a query to identify when a computation must cross data silos, and can leverage MPC in a scalable and usable manner when it is necessary to enable the computation.
In summary, while data sharing cyberinfrastructures today are intended to allow everyone to benefit from the initial cost of having one researcher collect data, privacy concerns (and the resulting breakdown of data sharing) transform this burden into a marginal cost that every researcher who wants access to the data must pay. We will describe how a holistic integration of secure MPC into a scientific computing infrastructure addresses a growing need in research computing: enabling scientific workflows involving collaborative experiments or replication/extension of existing results when the underlying data are encumbered by privacy constraints.
Mayank Varia is a research associate professor of computer science at Boston University and the co-director of the Center on Reliable Information Systems & Cyber Security (RISCS). His research interests span theoretical and applied cryptography and their application to problems throughout and beyond computer science. He currently directs an NSF Frontier project that addresses grand challenges in cloud security, aiming to design an architecture where the security of the system as a whole can be derived in a modular, composable fashion from the security of its components (bu.edu/macs). He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT for his work on program obfuscation.
Andrei Lapets is Associate Professor of the Practice in Computer Science, Director of Research Development at the Hariri Institute for Computing, and Director of the Software & Application Innovation Lab at Boston University. His research interests include cybersecurity, formal methods and domain-specific programming language design, and data science. He holds a Ph.D. from Boston University, and A.B. and S.M. degrees from Harvard University.
Please register here. Be sure to check spam/junk folder for registration confirmation email. The Department of Defense established DFARS 252. 204-701 which specifies that any research containing Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) be protected using NIST 800-171. This presentation will discuss the University of Connecticut's approach to implementing the NIST 800-171 framework, including: Contracting, Faculty Engagement, Infrastructure Implementation, Training and Controls Review.
The intention of this presentation is to provide a complete picture of what compliance with the NIST Standard requires. I will endeavor to describe the entire compliance process starting from conceptualization of the technology solution through to the post implementation review. The talk will be designed to appeal to compliance staff, technical staff and project managers and will emphasize elements required to build and sustain the compliance program. I will discuss the technology elements of our solution, generally, but will focus on how the technologies chosen met our goals of managing as many of the compliance requirements centrally as practical while providing a flexible solution.
Speaker Bio: Jason Pufahl is the Chief Information Security Officer for the University of Connecticut. He has 20 years of infrastructure and information security experience and has spent the last 10 years dedicated to information security and privacy. He has responsibility for information security for the institution, encompassing security awareness and training, disaster recovery, risk management, identity management, security policy and regulatory compliance, security analytics, and controls implementation.
Jason works closely with both the administrative and academic areas of the University. He is a member of the University’s Data Governance Committee, Joint Audit and Compliance Committee, and Public Safety Advisory Committee. He is also member of the University IRB with a primary focus of improving data privacy and security practices related to institutional research.
Jason has a Master’s in Education Technology and has a passion for professional development, security training and awareness. He designed and ran an information security and awareness game called HuskyHunt, founded the Connecticut Higher Education Roundtable on Information Security (CHERIS) to provide a quarterly forum for sharing of best practices in the field of information security targeted at higher education institutions in Connecticut and is active in the security community nationally. He is a frequent conference speaker and is a member of the NERCOMP vendor and licensing committee.
E-Infrastructures recognise that controlling information security is crucial for providing continuous and trustworthy services for their user communities. Such infrastructures, including grids and clouds, are subject to many of the same threats and vulnerabilities as each other because of the use of common software and technologies. Users who take part in more than one infrastructure are potential vectors that can spread infection from one infrastructure to another. All infrastructures can benefit from working together and sharing information on security issues.
Security for Collaborating Infrastructures (SCI) is a collaborative activity within the WISE trust community. The aim of the SCI trust framework is to manage cross infrastructure operational security risks. It builds trust between Infrastructures by defining policy standards for collaboration. The SCI group published version 1 of its trust framework in 2013. Two derivative frameworks have also been published; SIRTFI in 2015, and SNCTFI in 2017.
WISE/SCI has more recently produced version 2 of the SCI trust framework, to reflect changes in technology, culture and to cover a broader range of infrastructures. The framework contains numbered requirements in five areas (operational security, incident response, traceability, participant responsibilities and data protection) that each Infrastructure should address as part of promoting trust between Infrastructures. SCI’s updated version 2 was officially endorsed during the TNC 2017 conference by representatives of EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, GridPP, HBP, PRACE, SURF, WLCG and the USA’s XSEDE e-infrastructure.
The webinar will present the SCI Trust Framework together with current work on a new baseline AUP and a Policy Development Kit. Possible future activities will also be presented.
Speaker Bio: David Kelsey is head of the particle physics computing group at STFC, UK and has been leading Grid Security activities in many projects. He founded the Joint (WLCG/EGEE) Security Policy Group in 2004. He is currently the Chair of the WISE steering committee and was founder of the SCI activity. He has a Masters degree in Physics (Trinity College, Cambridge) and a PhD in Physics (University of Birmingham).
We're at an important stage in the history of science. The internet has dramatically accelerated the pace and scale of communication and collaboration. We have the computational resources to mine and discover complex relationships within massive datasets from diverse sources. This will usher in a new era of knowledge discovery that will undoubtedly lead to life-saving innovation, and access to content is paramount. But how do we balance transparency and privacy or transparency and IP concerns? How do we protect data from being selectively deleted? How do we decide what to make accessible with limited resources? How do we go from accessible to reusable and then to an ecosystem that fosters inclusivity and diversity?
And what if we no longer own the content we'd like to be made accessible? Such is the case with most journal articles. Skewed incentives have developed around centuries-old publishing practices that reward what is publishable rather than what is rigorous, reproducible, replicable, and reusable. In exchange for publications, we assign our copyrights to publishers, who then lease access back to us and our institutions at ever-increasing prices. And now publishers are turning their eyes--and very large profit margins--towards capturing the rest of the research workflow, including data and analytics. In contrast to the societal-level change that could occur if this research content were in an environment that maximized innovation and reuse, this is very dangerous.
This talk will discuss these urgent problems and the psychology that makes fixing them easier said than done as well as propose a practical, incremental approach to solving them via decentralized technologies, policy, and respect for researcher workflow.
Speaker Bio: Jeffrey Spies is the founder of 221B LLC, a strategic consulting firm combining expertise in research technology, methodology, and workflow to accelerate projects across higher-ed. Previously, he co-founded and served as the CTO of the Center for Open Science, a non-profit formed to maintain his Open Science Framework. Jeff has a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Virginia.
Operating a cloud resource involves addressing security requirements of multiple stakeholders: those of the resource operator and those of the resource user. These parties may have different incentives related to security as well as different levels of acumen. Operators may at times run images whose trustworthiness is not established and grant users privileged access within their running image that would be uncommon on non-virtualized computing resources. Moreover, users, with their elevated privileges, can misconfigure services, expose sensitive data or choose protocols/solutions that offer less security for the sake of installation or operating costs. These factors can lead to an environment that, by its nature, is difficult to secure.
A community consisting of The Agave Platform, Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing, CyVerse, Jetstream and Trusted CI collaborated in authoring a set of Security Best Practices for developing in, and operating an academic cloud resource. In this webinar, we will discuss the nine use cases they deemed most important to academic cloud services.
This webinar will be relevant to cloud users, evangelists, and providers. All are encouraged to join and contribute to the conversation.
The full white paper is available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/22123.
Speaker Bio: Rion Dooley is the Director of Platform Services and Solutions at Data Machines Corp. He has 15 years experience integrating emerging tech with HCP environments to build solutions that make it easier to conduct open, digital science. His prior research includes projects in the areas of cloud computing and security. He serves as PI for the Agave Project, and is active in the Open Source community.
The research and education (R&E) community faces particular challenges regarding cybersecurity: diversity of size and autonomy, the use of diverse infrastructure (scientific instruments, sensor networks, sequencers, etc.), the highly collaborative and dynamic nature of scientific communities, and the specialized expertise needed to support cybersecurity in the research context. This webinar provides an overview of the ResearchSOC, which provides the R&E community with cybersecurity services, training, and information sharing needed to make scientific cyberinfrastructure resilient to cyberattacks and capable of supporting trustworthy, productive research.
The ResearchSOC leverages existing cybersecurity services from Indiana University, Duke University, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. It combines these operational services with the establishment of a community of practice for sharing best practices, lessons learned, and operational intelligence. The ResearchSOC couples these services with outreach and training, targeted at research projects and the higher education information security community, to educate them on information security for research.
This webinar is ideal for technology managers supporting scientific research projects.
Speakers:
Von Welch: Director, Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and Director, Research Security Operations Center.
Richard Biever: Chief Information Security Officer, Duke University.
Michael Corn: Chief Information Security Officer at the University of California, San Diego.
Inna Kouper: Assistant Director, Data to Insight Center at Indiana University.
James Marsteller: Chief Information Security Officer of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Susan Sons: Chief Security Analyst at Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.
Cyberattacks on enterprise networks have moved into an era where both attackers and security analysts utilize complex strategies to confuse and mislead one another. Critical attacks often take multitudes of reconnaissance, exploitations, and obfuscation techniques to achieve the goal of cyber espionage and/or sabotage. The discovery and detection of new exploits, though needing continuous efforts, is no longer sufficient. Imagine a system that automatically extracts the ways the attackers use various techniques to penetrate a network and generates empirical models that can be used for in-depth analysis or even predict next attack actions. What if we can simulate synthetic attack scenarios based on characteristics of the network and adversary behaviors? Will publicly available information on the Internet be viable to forecast cyberattacks before they take place?
This talk will discuss advances that enable anticipatory cyber defense and open research questions. Specifically, this talk will present a suite of research efforts and prototypes: ASSERT integrates Bayesian-based learning with clustering to generate and refine attack models based on observed malicious activities; CASCADES explores how attackers discover vulnerabilities of the systems in the network to simulate potential attack progressions; CAPTURE overcomes limitations of imbalanced, insignificant, and non-stationary data to forecast cyberattacks before they happen using public domain signals. These ongoing research works provide much needed anticipatory capability for proactive cyber defense.This talk will be at a sufficiently high level to describe the needs for anticipatory cyber defense and some capabilities. The intended audience ranges from researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students who have some high level knowledge about cybersecurity.
Speaker Bio: Dr. S. Jay Yang received his BS degree in Electronics Engineering from National Chaio-Tung University in Taiwan in 1995, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He is currently a Professor and the Department Head for the Department of Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. He also serves as the Director of Global Outreach in the Center of Cybersecurity at RIT, and a Co-Director of the Networking and Information Processing (NetIP) Laboratory. His research group has developed several pioneering machine learning, attack modeling, and simulation systems to provide predictive analysis of cyberattacks, enabling anticipatory or proactive cyber defense. His earlier works included FuSIA, VTAC, ViSAw, F-VLMM, and attack obfuscation modeling. More recently, his team is developing a holistic body of work that encompasses ASSERT to provide timely separation and prediction of critical attack behaviors, CASCASE to simulate synthetic cyberattack scenarios that integrates data-driven and theoretically grounded understanding of adversary behaviors, and CAPTURE to forecast cyberattacks before they happen using unconventional signals in the public domain. Dr. Yang has published more than sixty papers and worked on eighteen sponsored research projects. He has served on organizing committees for several conferences and as a guest editor and a reviewer for a number of journals and textbooks. He was invited as a keynote or panel speaker for several venues. He was a recipient of Norman A. Miles Outstanding Teaching Awards, and a key contributor to the development of two Ph.D. programs at RIT and several global partnership programs.More information about Jay can be found at:https://www.camlis.org/shanchieh-jay-yang
Cyberinfrastructure is undergoing a radical transformation as traditional data centers are replaced by cloud computing. Cloud hosted applications tend to have a poorly defined network perimeter, large attack surfaces, and pose significant challenges for network visibility, segmentation, and authentication. We discuss research from the NSF SecureCloud project, which addresses the unique requirements of cloud security using an autonomic, zero trust architecture. We have created and tested original software using a first-of-a-kind cybersecurity test bed constructed at the New York State Cloud Computing & Analytic Center, Marist College. We developed the first honeypot for software defined network (SDN) controllers , and created honeypots for graph database APIs, SSH, and other applications. These honeypots collect raw data telemetry, which is processed into actionable threat intelligence using our Lightweight Cloud Analytics for Real Time Security (LCARS), an SIEM that includes the G-Star graph database and hive plot visualizer. We have built a threat intelligence database including attack patterns and orchestrated response recipes. We demonstrate dynamic reconfiguration using REST APIs for network appliances, while we cloak high risk applications using a combination of Transport Layer Access Control and First Packet Authentication. Use cases include reconfiguration of trust levels in response to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and other attacks.
Speaker Bio: Casimer DeCusatis is an Assistant Professor at Marist College. He is a Cisco Distinguished Speaker, Fellow of IEEE, OSA, SPIE, and recipient of the following awards: IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu, IEEE R1 Cybersecurity Education, Sigma Xi Walston Chubb, Mensa Copper Black, PSU Outstanding Alumnus, and IEEE/HKN OYEE. He received his M.S.(1988) & Ph.D.(1990) from RPI and his B.S. from Penn State (1986).
The REED+ framework integrates NIST SP 800-171 and other related NIST publications as the foundation of the framework. This framework serves as a standard for campus IT to align with security regulations and best practices, and create a single process for intake, contracting, and facilitate easy mapping of controlled research to CI resources for the sponsored programs office, human subjects office, and export control office.
The framework allows researchers to experience faster intake of new funded projects and be more competitive for research dollars. Using student-developed training materials and instruction, researchers, administrators, and campus IT are now able to more clearly understand previously complicated data security regulations affecting research projects.
The ecosystem developed from this project enables new partnerships with government agencies, and industry partners from the defense, aerospace, and life science sectors. Experiences and best practices in providing cyberinfrastructure and security awareness developed from this collaboration are documented and shared with the broader CI and campus community through conferences, journals and workshop.
Addition to the IT challenges - security controls, technology, or regulations, the REED+ team will discuss the use of research facilitators dedicated to regulated research, building relationships between campus IT organizations, appropriate compliance offices, research administration, IRBs, and export control offices; and improving institutional processes.
Ultimately the goal is to create a systematic approach which results in rapid flow from contracts to actionable technical requirements to implementation to approval, so that research data can begin in the minimum possible time frame.
Speaker bio: Preston Smith is the Director of Research Computing Services at Purdue University. Supporting over 180 HPC faculty, and 550 labs using research data systems, Purdue's Community Cluster program is a pioneering program for delivering "condo-style" HPC. At Purdue, his organization designs, builds, and operates compute systems, and delivers advanced research support to the campus community.
Internet routing is woefully insecure - in spite of many attacks and extensive awareness and efforts. But, finally, there is progress - and even some deployable defenses, based on free open-source software - including some that we develop in a CICI NSF project, whose goal is to get Internet Routing Security deployed in educational and research networks. These tools may help against different attacks - including Denial of Service, a significant problem for campuses and for scientific collaboration.
In this webinar, we will explain the challenges of Internet Routing Security, and the main tools - already deployable, in-progress, and briefly mention some less likely to be deployed. We will also discuss our directions, which include development of tools as well as pilot deployment with UConn and Connecticut Education Network. We hope this may help some of you to make progress in improving the security and reliability of networks, and establish cooperation with us as we proceeds with our project.
Speaker Bio: Amir Herzberg is the Comcast professor for Cybersecurity Innovation in the department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut. His research areas include: network security (esp. routing/DNS/transport, Denial-of-Service, Web), privacy and anonymity, applied cryptography, usable security, security for cyber-physical systems and social, economic and legal aspects of security.
Dr. Herzberg earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991 from the Technion in Israel. From 1991 to 1995, he worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where he was a research staff member and the manager of the Network Security research group. From 1996 to 2000, Dr. Herzberg was the Manager of E-Business and Security Technologies at the IBM Haifa Research Lab. From 2002 to 2017, he was a professor in Bar Ilan University (Israel).
Dr. Herzberg is the author of more than 150 research papers, five book chapters, and 24 patents. Dr. Herzberg has served on technical program committees of over 50 conferences, delivered keynote and plenary addresses at ten conferences, organized multiple professional events, and has been TPC chair of IEEE CNS’19, editor of PoPETS (2014-) and ACM TISSEC (2011-14), and area chair of CNS (2013-17). Dr. Herzberg is recipient of the Internet Society's Applied Networking Research award, 2017.
In this presentation, we will present the motivations behind and structure for the Trusted CI Framework and related implementation guidance for research. We’ll field questions, as well as discuss opportunities for the community to get be involved.
The Framework team members are Craig Jackson, Bob Cowles, Kay Avila, Scott Russell, Von Welch, and Jim Basney.
Speaker Bios:
Craig Jackson is Program Director at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR), where his research interests include information security program development and governance, cybersecurity assessments, legal and regulatory regimes' impact on information security and cyber resilience, evidence-based security, and innovative defenses. He leads CACR's collaborative work with the defense community and an interdisciplinary assessment and guidance team for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. He is a co-author of Security from First Principles: A Practical Guide to the Information Security Practice Principles. Craig is a graduate of the IU Maurer School of Law, IU School of Education, and Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to his litigation experience, Craig's research, design, project management, and psychology background includes work at the IU Center for Research on Learning and Technology and the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.
Robert (Bob) Cowles is principal in BrightLite Information Security performing cybersecurity assessments and consulting in research and education about information security and identity management. He served as CISO at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (1997-2012); participated in security policy development for LHC Computing Grid (2001-2008); and was an instructor at University of Hong Kong in information security (2000-2003). His CACR contributions include research for the XSIM project and the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.
The recent proliferation of sensors has created an environment in which human behaviors are continuously monitored and recorded. However, many types of this passively-generated data are particularly sensitive. For example, locations traces can be used to identify shopping, fitness, and eating habits. These traces have also been used to set insurance rates and to identify individual users in large, anonymized databases. To develop a trustworthy platform for ubiquitous computing applications, it will be necessary to provide strong privacy guarantees for the data consumed by these applications. Use-based privacy, which re-frames privacy as the prevention of harmful uses, is well-suited to address this problem.
This webinar introduces Ancile, a platform for enforcing use-based privacy for applications. Ancile is a run-time monitor positioned between applications and the data (such as location) they wish to utilize. Applications submit requests to Ancile; each request contains a program to be executed in Ancile’s trusted environment along with credentials to authenticate the application to Ancile. Ancile fetches data from a data provider, executes the program, and returns any output data to the application if and only if all commands in the program are authorized. We find that Ancile is both expressive and scalable. This suggests that use-based privacy is a promising approach to developing a privacy-enhancing platform for implementing location-based services and other applications that consume passively-generated data.
Speaker Bio: Jason Waterman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vassar College. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science at Harvard University in the area of Coordinated Resource Management in Sensor Networks. He has also worked as research staff at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he helped to build a system for monitoring patients in disaster situations.
With the continued rise of scientific computing and the enormous increases in the size of data being processed, scientists must consider whether the processes for transmitting and storing data sufficiently assure the integrity of the scientific data. When integrity is not preserved, computations can fail and result in increased computational cost due to reruns, or worse, results can be corrupted in a manner not apparent to the scientist and produce invalid science results. Technologies such as TCP checksums, encrypted transfers, checksum validation, RAID and erasure coding provide integrity assurances at different levels, but they may not scale to large data sizes and may not cover a workflow from end-to-end, leaving gaps in which data corruption can occur undetected.In this talk, we will present our findings from the “Scientific Workflow Integrity with Pegasus” (SWIP) project by describing an approach of assuring data integrity - considering either malicious or accidental corruption - for workflow executions orchestrated by the Pegasus Workflow Management System (WMS). A key goal of SWIP is to provide assurance that any changes to input data, executables, and output data associated with a given workflow can be efficiently and automatically detected. Towards this goal, SWIP has integrated data integrity protection into a newly released version of Pegasus WMS by automatically generating and tracking checksums for both when inputs files are introduced and for the files generated during execution. We will describe how we validate our integrity protection approach by leveraging Chaos Jungle - a toolkit providing an environment for validating integrity verification mechanisms by allowing researchers to introduce a variety of integrity errors during data transfers and storage. We will also provide an analysis of integrity errors and associated overheads that we encountered when running production workflows using Pegasus.
Speaker Bios: Anirban Mandal serves as the Assistant Director for network research and infrastructure group at Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), UNC-Chapel Hill. He leads efforts in science cyberinfrastructures. His research interests include resource provisioning, scheduling, performance analysis, and anomaly detection for distributed computing systems, cloud computing, and scientific workflows. Prior to joining RENCI, he earned his PhD degree in Computer Science from Rice University in 2006 and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Mumbai, India in 2000.
Mats Rynge is a computer scientist in the Science Automation Technologies group at the USC Information Sciences Institute. He is a developer on the Pegasus Workflow Management System and related projects. He is also involved in several national cyberinfrastructure deployments such as the Open Science Grid and XSEDE, for which he provides user support, software engineering and system administration. Previously, he was at the Renaissance Computing institute where he was the technical lead on the RENCI Science TeraGrid Gateway and the Open Science Grid Engagement activities. Before that he was a release manager on the NPACI NPACKage and NSF Middleware Initiative projects where he planned, created, and tested software middleware stacks for larger science communities.He also worked on improving grid software as part of Community Driven Improvement of Globus Software (CDIGS) and Coordinated TeraGrid Software and Services (CTSS) efforts.
Jupyter Notebooks have become tremendously popular for creating, sharing and reproducing science. While they are relatively easy to setup and use, there has (until recently) been little concern regarding the security implications of running these Notebooks. This presentation will cover the developments and practices used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to secure notebooks running in multi-tenant, HPC environments.
Speaker Bio: Thomas Mendoza is a staff Computer Scientist at LLNL working for Livermore Computing’s HPC center on web architecture and security.
The past few years have seen a resurgence of privacy laws around the globe, starting with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but leading to proposed laws in South Korea, Brazil, and the United States. These numerous laws may be targeted at enhancing privacy, but their biggest effect has been as a source of fear and confusion for those who are being regulated. This talk will build upon last year’s GDPR webinar, introduce CCPA, and then go on to discuss trends in global privacy more broadly: what’s happening, what’s coming, and what should you do about it.
Speaker Bio: Scott Russell is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR), where his work focuses on privacy and cybersecurity policy. A lawyer and researcher, Scott received his B.A. in Computer Science and History from the University of Virginia, received his J.D. from Indiana University, interned at MITRE, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at CACR.
The DDIDD Project (DDoS Defense in Depth for DNS) is applying existing and developing new defenses against Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks for operational DNS infrastructure. We are building a defense-in-depth approach to mitigate Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks for DNS servers, with approaches to filter spoofed traffic, identify known-good traffic when possible, and employ cloud-based scaling to handle the largest attacks. We are working with USC's B-Root team to test our approaches as a case study, and are making approaches open source as they become available. This talk will summarize the project and our overall approach, provide details about some of our early filters and filter selection, and describe where we plan to go in the remaining year.
Speaker Bio: John Heidemann is a principal scientist at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) and a research professor at USC in Computer Science. At ISI he leads the ANT (Analysis of Network Traffic) Lab, studying how to observe and analyze Internet topology and traffic to improve network reliability, security, protocols, and critical services. He is a senior member of ACM and fellow of IEEE.
The Research and Education Networks Information Sharing and Analysis Center (REN-ISAC) serves members within the higher education and research community by promoting cybersecurity operational protection and response.
REN-ISAC membership is not just for university security officers! REN-ISAC has multiple membership communities that are applicable to research facilities. Kim will discuss the benefits of REN-ISAC membership that are applicable to research facility/project representatives and will solicit feedback from webinar attendees on future service offerings.
For example, the REN-ISAC members benefit from Security Event System (SES) threat intelligence and other automated data collection and sharing tools to enable informed decisions about threats and events, as well as peer assessment services to improve the institution’s overall security posture. The REN-ISAC offers members daily cybersecurity news situational awareness, alerts and advisories, analysis reports of cybersecurity threats and mitigation, and an active, interested community of subject matter experts who provide feedback on practices and standards. The REN-ISAC also fosters professional training and development through monthly webinars, regional workshops, and an aggregate purchasing program with the SANS Institute.
Speaker Bio: Kim Milford serves as Executive Director of the REN-ISAC, working with research and education institutions, partners, and sponsors to provide services and information that allow member institutions to better defend technical environments from cyberthreats. Ms. Milford oversees administration and operations for the REN-ISAC. Ms. Milford served in several roles leading strategic IT initiatives since 2007 at Indiana University. As Chief Privacy Officer, she coordinated privacy-related efforts, chaired the Committee of Data Stewards, and directed the work of the University Information Policy Office and IU's IT incident response team. Prior to joining Indiana University, Ms. Milford worked as Information Security Officer at the University of Rochester. As Information Security Manager at University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1998 - 2005, she assisted in establishing the university's information security department and co-led in the development of an annual security conference. Ms. Milford provides cybersecurity expertise and presentations at national and regional conferences, seminars and consortia, as well as taught courses on Internet security and authored/co-authored many articles on the subject. Ms. Milford has a B.S. in Accounting from Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri and a J.D. from John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois.
Testbeds can be great for trying out new ideas and not taking down a production network, or they can be useless and impossible to figure out. FABRIC took the best of past testbeds and is creating a new, useful national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge, exploratory research at-scale in computer networking, security, machine learning, distributed computing and applications.
It will be a nation-wide high-speed (100-1000 Gbps) network interconnecting major research centers and computing facilities that will allow researchers, operators and engineers to develop and experiment with new distributed application, compute and network architectures not possible today. FABRIC nodes can store and process information "in the network" in ways not possible in the current Internet, which will lead to completely new networking protocols, architectures and applications that address pressing problems with performance, security and adaptability in the Internet. Reaching deep into university campuses, FABRIC will connect university researchers and their local compute clusters and scientific instruments to the larger FABRIC infrastructure. The infrastructure will also provide access to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. This experimental facility will allow multiple experiments to be conducted simultaneously, and is capable of incorporating real traffic and real users into experiments. For more information about FABRIC visit https://www.fabric-testbed.net.
Speaker Bio: Anita Nikolich is a Research Professor in Computer Science at Illinois Tech, Fellow at the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Harris School of Public Policy at The University of Chicago, co-organizer of the DEFCON AI Village, and ARIN Advisory Council member. She is Co-Director of FABRIC.
Data-intensive science applications in research fields such as bioinformatics, chemistry, and material science are increasingly becoming multi-domain in nature. To augment local campus CyberInfrastructure (CI) resources, these applications rely on multi-institutional resources that are remotely accessible (e.g., scientific instruments, supercomputers, public clouds). Provisioning of such federated CI resources has been traditionally based on applications’ performance and quality of service (QoS) requirements. This talk will detail our project that aims to augment traditional resource provisioning schemes through novel schemes for formalizing end-to-end security requirements to align security posture across multi-domain resources with heterogeneous policies. We will present our OnTimeURB broker design to foster end-to-end multi-domain security for science gateway applications in bioinformatics and health information sharing that involves defining, formalizing and implementing security specifications along an application's workflow lifecycle stages. More information about OnTimeURB is available at https://sites.google.com/view/ontimebroker/.
Speaker Bio: Prasad Calyam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Missouri-Columbia. His research and development areas of interest include: Distributed and Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Computer Networking, Networked-Multimedia Applications, and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. He has published over 125 papers in various conference and journal venues. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
Algorithms and computers have been used for a long time in supporting decision making in various fields of human endeavors. Examples include optimization techniques in engineering, statistics in experiment design, modeling of different natural phenomena, and so on. In all such uses of algorithms and computers, an essential question has been how much we can trust them, what are the potential errors of such models, what is the field range of their applicability? With time the algorithms and computers we use have become more powerful and more complex, and we call them today as Artificial Intelligence that includes various machine learning and other algorithmic techniques. But the increase of power and complexity of algorithms and computers and with extended use of them the question of how much we should trust them becomes more crucial. Their complexity might hide more potential errors and especially the interdependencies; their solution might be difficult to be explained, and so on. To deal with these problems, we have developed an evidence and measurement-based trust management system; our system can be used to measure trust in human to human, human to machine, and machine to machine interactions. In this talk, we will introduce our trust system and its validation on real stock market data. Furthermore, we will discuss the use of our trust system to build more secure computer systems, filter fake news on social networks and develop better collective decision making support systems in managing natural resources, as well as future potential uses.
Speaker Bio: Arjan Durresi is a Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis, Indiana. In the past, he held positions at LSU and The Ohio State University. His research interests include trustworthy decision making and AI, networking, and security. He has published about 100 articles in journals and over 200 articles in conference proceedings and seven book chapters. He also has authored over thirty contributions to standardization organizations such as IETF, ATM Forum, ITU, ANSI and TIA.
The science and cyberinfrastructure community writes a huge quantity of software in the form of services, web applications, and infrastructure to support its mission. Each deployed software component can open your organization to the risk of attack, creating violations of data integrity and privacy, and provide unauthorized access to your computing and science infrastructure. An important part of preventing such attacks is an in-depth review of your code.
The goal of an in depth code review is to understand the structure of your software, identify the critical parts of code and the resources they control, understand trust and privilege, and then use this information to focus key parts of the code. Such a review can identify design issues, coding problems, and deployment mistakes. By focusing on the software structure and resources, you can anticipate types of vulnerabilities that have not yet been seen in the wild. This type of review can take beyond the capabilities of penetration testing.
We will briefly describe our First Principles Vulnerability Assessment (FPVA), which we have applied to a wide variety of real-world software, under the aegis of TrustedCI and other organizations. This software has included systems such as HTCondor, Wireshark, Singularity, Google Chrome, and even software that controls almost half the container shipping ports in the world.
We will describe our experiences with such assessments and discuss how you, as an organization that writes or deploys custom software can access or create such an assessment and how you would work with the assessment team. And, importantly, we will discuss how you respond to the identification of vulnerabilities in your software.
Speaker Bios: Barton Miller is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, and Amar & Belinder Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also Chief Scientist for the DHS Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP) research facility, leads the software assurance effort for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (TrustedCI), and co-directs the MIST software vulnerability assessment project in collaboration with his colleagues at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He also leads the Paradyn Parallel Performance Tool project, which is investigating performance and instrumentation technologies for parallel and distributed applications and systems. His research interests include systems security, binary and malicious code analysis and instrumentation extreme scale systems, parallel and distributed program measurement and debugging, and mobile computing. Miller's research is supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, NATO, and various corporations.
In 1988, Miller founded the field of Fuzz random software testing, which is the foundation of many security and software engineering disciplines. In 1992, Miller (working with his then-student, Prof. Jeffrey Hollingsworth), founded the field of dynamic binary code instrumentation and coined the term "dynamic instrumentation". Dynamic instrumentation forms the basis for his current efforts in malware analysis and instrumentation.
Miller was the chair of the IDA Center for Computing Sciences Program Review Committee, a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Computing, Communications and Networking Division Review Committee, and has been on the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force (Chicago Area). Miller is a Fellow of the ACM.
Elisa Heymann is a Senior Scientist on the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an Associate Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She co-directs the MIST software vulnerability assessment at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.
She coordinates in-depth vulnerability assessments for NFS Trusted CI, and was also in charge of the Grid/Cloud security group at the UAB, and participated in two major Grid European Projects: EGI-InSPIRE and European Middleware Initiative (EMI). Heymann's research interests include software security and resource management for Grid and Cloud environments. Her research is supported by the NSF, Spanish government, the European Commission, and NATO.
Susan Sons, Deputy Director of the Research Security Operations Center (ResearchSOC) will provide a mini threat briefing (a brief brief) and a broader discussion on how the research cybersecurity community approaches threat intelligence when we're at our best, and when we're at our worst. Please join us and bring your questions! Speaker Bio: Susan serves as Deputy Director of ResearchSOC and Chief Security Analyst of IU's Center of Applied Cybersecurity Research. She has a slight obsession with improving software engineering practices and the security of ICS/SCADA assets. Known vulnerabilities: Can be bribed with dark chocolate.
Today’s collaborative science often utilizes massive datasets shared across great distances. With better access to data we ask harder questions: interactive data sources change the very science we do. These factors have also given rise to new challenges, namely understanding the end-to-end performance of large data transfers. In a growing, complex, global network, no one person or entity controls all the pieces. End users don’t know what kind of performance to expect. Soft failures are notoriously difficult to find. Just as today’s science is collaborative, so must be our approach to troubleshooting and resolution of network performance issues. EPOC was created to be a focal point for these efforts, bringing together operational expertise and analysis to shed light on the multi-faceted problems that hamper research data movement. Along with our partners in this space, such as Trusted CI, we are able to coordinate efforts between researchers, CI engineers, and network operators to bring resolution to complex data transfer issues, whether the root cause is technical or, as we have discovered in many cases, social. Community engagement has often proven to be the missing piece of the puzzle in this ever changing landscape, and lessons learned from these engagements are invaluable as we continue forward to the next phases of large-scale collaborative science.
Speaker Bio:Doug Southworth is a Network Systems Analyst for International Networks at Indiana University, working with EPOC, perfSONAR, and NetSage in both developer and science engagement roles, focusing on performance analysis. Prior to working at IU, Southworth has held senior systems engineer positions with several state and federal agencies, including his last position with the United States Courts.
"Transition to practice is really a passion of mine. It is wonderful to write papers and have great ideas. But it is even cooler to get a million people using it." – Professor Patrick Traynor.Join us to hear exciting Cybersecurity Research success stories, and lessons learned along the way, from Professor Patrick Traynor from the University of Florida who has successfully transitioned his research to practice in a number of ways. One of his technologies, the Skim Reaper, is being used across multiple U.S. states to protect from credit card skimming. We will also share tools that Trusted CI has developed to help you take the Transition To Practice journey as a developer and researcher. Florence Hudson and Ryan Kiser will present the "Trusted CI TTP Playbook" available on the Trusted CI website, with TTP Tools you can use. This includes a TTP Canvas to enable the researcher and developer to clarify their target users, value proposition, and how they will TTP. We also include a TTP Technology Readiness Level (TRL) assessment tool to design your technical journey to mature and transition to practice your valuable research.
Speaker Bios:
Florence D. Hudson is a Special Advisor at Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, co-leading the Transition To Practice (TTP) program. She has led TTP at IBM, Internet2 and Trusted CI. She is a former IBM Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Internet2 Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer, and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineer at Northrop Grumman and NASA. She is Executive Director for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, and Founder and CEO of Advanced Technology and Diversity & Inclusion Consulting Firm FDHint, LLC. She received her BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, and completed Executive Education at Harvard Business School and Columbia University.
Ryan Kiser is a Senior Security Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. Ryan has worked on information security projects across a wide variety of domains including leading efforts to assess and improve the security of automotive engine systems, performing risk assessments for university central IT systems, and supporting researchers in efforts to adhere to regulated data requirements such as HIPAA, FISMA, and various CUI requirements. Ryan has been heavily involved in organizations serving information security needs for higher-ed and national research communities. Some of these include the Open Science Grid (OSG) as a member of the OSG Security Team and Trusted CI where he has led engagements to assist NSF-funded research projects in improving their security posture. His current interests involve novel applications of predictive modeling, machine learning, and brazilian jiu-jitsu.Patrick Traynor is a professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida. Patrick's research focuses on the security of mobile systems, with a concentration on telecommunications infrastructure and mobile devices. His research has uncovered critical vulnerabilities in cellular networks, developed techniques to find credit card skimmers that have been adopted by law enforcement and created robust approaches to detecting and combating Caller-ID scams. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2010, was named a Sloan Fellow in 2014, a Fellow of the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion in 2016 and a Kavli Fellow in 2017. Professor Traynor earned his Ph.D and M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and 2004, respectively, and his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Richmond in 2002. He is also a co-founder of Pindrop Security, CryptoDrop, and Skim Reaper.
Dr. S. Jay Yang received his BS degree in Electronics Engineering from National Chaio-Tung University in Taiwan in 1995, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He is currently a Professor and the Department Head for the Department of Computer Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. He also serves as the Director of Global Outreach in the Center of Cybersecurity at RIT, and a Co-Director of the Networking and Information Processing (NetIP) Laboratory. His research group has developed several pioneering machine learning, attack modeling, and simulation systems to provide predictive analysis of cyberattacks, enabling anticipatory or proactive cyber defense. His earlier works included FuSIA, VTAC, ViSAw, F-VLMM, and attack obfuscation modeling. More recently, his team is developing a holistic body of work that encompasses ASSERT to provide timely separation and prediction of critical attack behaviors, CASCASE to simulate synthetic cyberattack scenarios that integrates data-driven and theoretically grounded understanding of adversary behaviors, and CAPTURE to forecast cyberattacks before they happen using unconventional signals in the public domain. Dr. Yang has published more than sixty papers and worked on eighteen sponsored research projects. He has served on organizing committees for several conferences and as a guest editor and a reviewer for a number of journals and textbooks. He was invited as a keynote or panel speaker for several venues. He was a recipient of Norman A. Miles Outstanding Teaching Awards, and a key contributor to the development of two Ph.D. programs at RIT and several global partnership programs.
University of Virginia's Ron Hutchins, Tho Nguyen, and Neal Magee, present ACCORD: Integrating CI policy and mechanism to support research on sensitive data.
Today, a large number of researchers do not have access to secure, compliance-capable research computing infrastructure at their home institutions. Traditional institutional secure CI only supports “in-house” users. The ACCORD project is set up to address the challenge of scaling institutional secure research computing services to support community users. To accomplish this goal, we are deploying a policy-centric cyberinfrastructure that prioritizes security, compliance, and accessibility. In this presentation, we describe ACCORD’s approach of leveraging the latest CI tools to compartmentalize research environments into reusable containers that can be catalogued and managed. For example, we rely on InCommon federation to streamline user authentication hurdles, COmanage to lessen user onboarding and management difficulties, and containers coupled with a web-driven interface to alleviate the user accessibility burden. The challenge is to, hopefully, hit the right levels of simplicity and security for a variety of users. In this presentation we will also share the current project status, lessons learned, and future goals. Discussion will be welcome.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Ronald R. Hutchins currently serves as Vice President for Information Technology. In this role, Ron focuses on creating a university-wide strategy in IT for teaching, learning, research, and administrative technologies while honoring the University’s deep culture and tradition. Prior to joining UVA, Ron served as Associate Vice Provost for Research and Technology, Chief Technology Officer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
The US has historically taken a fairly minimalist approach to cybersecurity regulation, but recent years have evidenced a trend toward increasing regulation. The latest in this trend is the US Department of Defense’s “Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification” (CMMC). CMMC has garnered quite a bit of attention recently, as it intends to impose cybersecurity compliance requirements on the entire Defense Industrial Base (DIB), over 300,000 organizations (including some universities). CMMC has emerged at a breakneck pace, and there is still a great deal of uncertainty regarding who is impacted, what is required, and how organizations should respond.
This talk will 1) introduce US cybersecurity regulation and compliance generally; 2) provide the background and context leading to CMMC; 3) overview CMMC; and 4) suggest approaches for thinking about cybersecurity compliance moving forward. Speaker Bio: Scott Russell is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. Scott was previously the Postdoctoral Fellow in Information Security Law & Policy. Scott’s work thus far has emphasized private sector cybersecurity best practices, data aggregation and the First and Fourth Amendments, and cybercrime in international law. Scott studied Computer Science and History at the University of Virginia and received his J.D. from the Indiana University, Maurer School of Law.
Advances in computer systems over the past decade have laid a solid foundation for data collection at a staggering scale. Data generated from end-user devices has tremendous value to the research community. For example, mobile and Internet-of-Things devices can participate in large-scale Internet-based measurement or monitoring of patient's health conditions. While ground-breaking discovered may occur, malicious attacks or unintentional data leaks threaten the research data. Such a threat is hard to predict and difficult to recover from once it happens. Preventative and defensive measures should be taken where data is generated in order to protect private, valuable data from the attackers. Currently, there are efforts that try to regulate data management, for example, a research application might have a privacy policy that describes how the user data is being collected and protected. However, there is a disconnect between these documented policies and the implementations of a research project.
In this talk, I’ll present our research, which interprets the documented policies automatically with NLP (natural language processing) and enforce them in the code of research projects, in order to protect the privacy of research data. This work can significantly reduce researchers' overhead in implementing policy-compliant code and reduce the complexity of protecting research datasets.
Speaker Bio:
Yuan Tian is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Virginia. Her research focuses on security and privacy and its interactions with systems, and machine learning. Her work has a real-world impact on platforms (such as iOS, Chrome, and Azure). She is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award 2020, Amazon Faculty Fellowship 2019, CSAW Best Paper Award 2019, Rising Stars in EECS 2016.
The Trustworthy Data Working Group hosted a panel on Monday December 7th 2020 to discuss tools, standards, community practices for trustworthy scientific data sharing. Our panelists are:
Jim Basney: Deputy Director, Trusted CI
Sandra Gesing: Associate Research Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Computational Scientist, Center for Research Computing; University of Notre Dame (PresQT)
Bob Hanisch: Director of Office of Data & Informatics, NIST
Rebecca Koskela: Executive Director, Research Data Alliance - US (RDA-US)
The Trustworthy Data Working Group (TDWG) is a collaborative effort of Trusted CI, the four NSF Big Data Innovation Hubs, the NSF CI CoE Pilot, the Ostrom Workshop on Data Management and Information Governance, the NSF Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC), the Indiana Geological and Water Survey, the Open Storage Network, and other interested community members. The goal of the working group is to understand scientific data security concerns and provide guidance on ensuring the trustworthiness of data.This year the TDWG published a survey report about data security concerns and practices amongst the scientific community. And, building off the insights of the survey report, the working group published a guidance report on trustworthy data for science projects, including science gateways, that covers the topics that the panel will be discussing.This panel is an opportunity to discuss the work of the TDWG in the larger context of related work by PresQT, NIST, and RDA-US.
Purdue has made giant leaps in the growth of their Regulated Research Program (REED+) in the past several years. Quite possibility the most bold, was the transition from a widely described NIST 800-171 AWS-GovCloud environment to an On-Prem HPC cluster. We’ll share what lead to this noteworthy redesign, and what lessons have been learned in the year since this transition.
The REED+ framework integrates NIST SP 800-171 and other related NIST publications as the foundation of the framework. This framework serves as a standard for campus IT to align with security regulations and best practices, and create a single process for intake, contracting, and facilitate easy mapping of controlled research to CI resources for the sponsored programs office, human subjects office, and export control office. The framework allows researchers to experience faster intake of new funded projects and be more competitive for research dollars. We’ll share our best practices and processes.
Looking beyond a single institution, Purdue REED+ has been leading a facilitated regulated research series of six small workshops. These have gathered expertise from around the country to discuss the challenges and successes within their Institution’s regulated research program. We’ll share how we’ve structured these workshops that are bringing together experience that largely still exists hidden at the institution. Note: This presentation is a return visit for the REED+ team. Their 2019 presentation is available on YouTube.
Speaker Bios:
Carolyn Ellis is a Program Manager at Purdue University focusing in strengthening their Regulated Research Program. Over the last four years she grown the program from a single project to a thriving ecosystem handling various regulations such as HIPAA and NIST 800-171. Carolyn is passionate about efforts growing future leaders within CUI Community Development, and mentoring with both EDUCAUSE Women in IT and WiCys (Women in Cybersecurity).
Dr. Baijian “Justin” Yang is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette. He served as a steering member of IEEE Cybersecurity Initiative from 2015 to 2017 and was a board director ATMAE from 2014-2016. His research interests include applied machine learning, big data and cybersecurity. He also holds several industry certifications, such as CISSP, MCSE, and Six Sigma Black Belt.
Preston Smith is the Executive Director of Research Computing at Purdue University. Supporting over 180 HPC faculty, and 550 labs using research data systems, Purdue's Community Cluster program is a pioneering program for delivering "condo-style" HPC. At Purdue, his organization designs, builds, and operates compute systems, and delivers advanced research support to the campus community.
In an era where big data, machine learning algorithms, and simulations are used to understand cyberattacks and cybersecurity, is there room for qualitative or 'thick' data? This talk shares a social scientist’s perspective on the relevance of thick data in understanding the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of adversarial behavior, movement, decision-making, adaptation to disruptions, and group dynamics. More specifically, it highlights potential for symbiotic relationships between social science methodologies, such as observations and focus groups, and technical methodologies, such as time series analysis, social network analysis, and machine learning and prediction. The talk will then share how social science students must be trained via discipline-specific education to effectively engage in the cybersecurity discourse. It details specific educational efforts via social engineering course projects and capture-the-flag competitions that not only cater to social science students, but also technical students, and how these efforts help break silos to foster multidisciplinary dialog.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Aunshul Rege is an Associate Professor with the Department of Criminal Justice. She is the Director of the CARE (Cybersecurity in Application, Research, and Education) Lab, which focuses on the human and social aspects of cyberattacks and cybersecurity. Dr. Rege is the recipient of numerous National Science Foundation grants, including the prestigious NSF CAREER award. Her research examines adversarial decision-making, adaptation and movement, and she has worked with Computer Scientists and Engineers in academia, industry and government. Dr. Rege and her team at the CARE Lab have generated a critical infrastructure ransomware incident dataset, which maps to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and is highly requested by organizations, governments, academics, and students from all over the world. Dr. Rege is also passionate about cybersecurity education and has designed several experiential social engineering learning projects, which have been mapped to the NICE cybersecurity workforce framework and downloaded worldwide by educators and businesses. A month ago, she hosted a purely social engineering capture the flag competition at Temple University, which featured professional social engineers as judges and six undergraduate student teams. This competition is the first cybersecurity capture-the-flag competition to emphasize the human factor that is grounded in the social sciences. Dr. Rege has received a new NSF education grant, which will allow her to pursue this endeavor starting 2021. Not only has Dr. Rege's work been published in well-regarded journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings, but her efforts have also been recognized in highly regarded cybersecurity outlets like Security Week, Bleeping Computer, and Dark Reading. She hopes to continue to make the social sciences more mainstream and embedded in the cybersecurity discourse.
SciTokens (https://scitokens.org/), an NSF CICI project, works to advance the use of bearer tokens and capabilities in distributed scientific infrastructures. It applies the JSON Web Token (JWT) and OAuth standards to the needs of scientific cyberinfrastructure, where widely-distributed computing, data, instruments, and software services are harnessed for scientific workflows, requiring an authorization mechanism that itself is distributed. Typically, JWTs are used in a single web application, with a single token issuer and verifier and OAuth2 deployment scenarios support only one or a few token issuers, using opaque tokens that must be validated by a callback to the corresponding issuer. In contrast, SciTokens supports many token issuers, with signing keys, policies, and endpoint URLs published via OAuth Authorization Server Metadata, using self-describing JWTs rather than opaque tokens, so the tokens can be independently verified by distributed services without requiring a callback to the token issuer.
The use of JWTs with OAuth is now a draft profile of the IETF OAuth working group. OAuth token refresh enables long-lived scientific workflows, and OAuth Token Exchange enables workflow systems to reduce token privileges, effectively implementing least-privilege delegation across the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.
In this webinar, members of the SciTokens project will discuss progress since their 2019 NSF Summit presentation, including the project's latest open source software releases, interoperability with the WLCG Common JWT Profiles, updates from Fermilab, LIGO, XSEDE, and WLCG (presented at the recent TAGPMA Workshop on Token-Based Authentication and Authorization), and support for SciTokens in CILogon and HTCondor.
Speaker Bios: Jim Basney is a Principal Research Scientist in NCSA's Cybersecurity Division, Brian Bockelman is an Investigator at Morgridge Institute for Research, Todd Tannenbaum is a Researcher in Distributed Computing at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Derek Weitzel is a Research Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.