CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

Recent years have been pivotal in the field of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security, with a large number of high-profile attacks exposing the lack of a design-for-security initiative in ICS. The evolution of ICS abstracting the control logic to a purely software level hosted on a generic OS, combined with hyperconnectivity and the integration of popular open source libraries providing advance...

In the past 30 years, the world has experienced a booming IoT market, advances in automation and OT systems, and an ever-increasing dependence on cyber in every aspect of modern life.  This target rich environment is ideal for cyber adversaries seeking access to systems and devices for financial gain, espionage, digital harassment, or outright cyber-warfare.  Naturally, this leads to expanded atta...

Recorded: 09/18/2024 CERIAS Security Seminar at Purdue University Exploiting Vulnerabilities in AI-Enabled UAV: Attacks and Defense Mechanisms Ashok Vardhan Raja, Purdue University Northwest In recent years, UAVs have seen significant growth in both military and civilian applications, thanks to their high mobility and advanced sensing capabilities. This expansion has been further accelerated by ra...

The Information Design Assurance Red(IDART) methodology is optimized to evaluate system designs and identify vulnerabilities by adopting, in detail, the varying perspectives of a system's most likely adversaries. The results provide system owners with an attacker's-eye view of their system's strengths and weaknesses. IDART can be applied to a diversity of complex networks, systems, and application...

At Purdue University, Ms. Kubecka will discuss how technologists, especially the next generation of digital defenders, can be empowered to consider ethics in cybersecurity, privacy, and emerging technologies, and how they can use their power for good in tech. About the speaker: Ms. Chris Kubecka is a globally recognized cybersecurity expert with over two decades of experience, known for her pivota...

Students: this is a hybrid event. You are strongly encouraged to attend in-person. Location:  STEW G52 (Suite 050B) WL Campus. The rapid commercialization of GenAI products and services has significantly broadened the landscape of potential attack vectors targeting enterprise infrastructure, operations, and processes. This evolution poses substantial risks to enterprise assets and operations, requ...

The increased use of machine learning (ML) technologies on proprietary and sensitive datasets has led to increased privacy breaches in many sectors, including healthcare and personalized medicine. Although federated learning (FL) systems allow multiple parties to train ML models collaboratively without sharing their raw data with third-party entities, security concerns arise from the involvement o...

For the past four years, Sandia National Laboratories has been conducting a focused research effort on Trusted AI for national security problems. The goal is to develop the fundamental insights required to use AI methods in high-consequence national security applications while also improving the practical deployment of AI. This talk looks at key properties of many national security problems along...

In this presentation, I provide a thorough exploration of how dataflow analysis serves as a formidable method for discovering and addressing cybersecurity threats across a wide spectrum of vulnerability types. For instance, I'll illustrate how we can employ dynamic information flow tracking to automatically detect "blind spots"—sections of a program's input that can be changed without influencing...

The aim of this discussion is to publicize both the challenge and potential solution for the integration of secure supply chain risk management content into conventional software engineering programs. The discipline of software engineering typically does not teach students how to ensure that the code produced and sold in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products hasn't been compromised during the s...

How Cybersecurity relates to various fields of business/ industries – how it works in these fields, different risks and vulnerabilities that are out there, which explains why manufacturing cybersecurity into the design of a product or service is so imperative. In companies today Budget Managers and Business Managers and Engineers are making decisions on their cybersecurity options without includin...

Reputation systems are crucial to online platforms' health. They are prevalent across online marketplaces and social media platforms either visibly (e.g., as star ratings and badges) or invisibly as signals that feed into recommendation engines. In theory, good behavior (e.g., honest, accurate, high-quality) begets high reputation, while poor behavior is deterred and pushed off the platform.  In t...

The frequency, materiality, and impact of cybersecurity incidents is at a level that the business world has never seen before. CISOs are at the forefront of this. The speaker has experience with developing cybersecurity products and managing IT infrastructure and security from startup to massive scale. The talk will go through the roles, responsibilities, rewards, and perils, of being a CISO in a...

In the realm of risk, cybersecurity is a fairly new idea. Most people currently entering the cybersecurity profession do not remember a time when cybersecurity was not a major concern. Yet at the time of this writing, reliance on computers to run business operations is less than a century old. Prior to this time, operational risk was more concerned with natural disasters than man-made ones. Fraud...

We must be methodical and intentional about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are designed, developed, deployed, and operationalized, particularly in critical infrastructure contexts. CISA, the UK-NCSC, and our partners advocate a secure by design approach where security is a core requirement and integral to the development of AI systems from the outset, and throughout their lifecycle, to b...

Tensor decomposition is a powerful unsupervised machine learning method used to extract hidden patterns from large datasets. This presentation aims to illuminate the extensive applications and capabilities of tensors within the realm of cybersecurity. We offer a comprehensive overview by encapsulating a diverse array of capabilities, showcasing the cutting-edge employment of tensors in the detecti...

In the course of the talk I'll discuss current authentication challenges, the looming problem with cracking public key encryption, and short and medium term recommendations to help folks stay secure. About the speaker: Bill helps clients achieve an effective information security posture spanning endpoints, networks, servers, cloud, and the Internet of Things.  This involves technology, policy, and...

Exploitations in cybersecurity continue to increase in sophistication and prevalence.  The purpose of this talk is to discuss how the evolution of malware has led to increased exploitation and then discuss ways to enhance the cybersecurity paradigm. About the speaker: Solomon Sonya (@0xSolomonSonya) is a Computer Science Graduate Student at Purdue University.  He earned his undergraduate degree in...

Evil has been lurking in the Internet since its inception.  The IETF recognized this, releasing RFC 3514 on the evil bit.  Unfortunately it isn't widely adopted, so we have to find our evil in other ways.  Grepping is a time honored way of finding needles in haystacks, so let's see how much evil we can find in the DNS haystack...And can we answer the question of "Why is it so easy?" About the spea...

The field of cybersecurity is constantly evolving, and Device Fingerprinting (DFP) has emerged as a crucial technique for identifying network devices based on their unique traffic data. This is necessary to protect against sophisticated cyber-attacks. However,automating device classification is complex, as it involves a vast and diverse feature space derived from various network layers, such as ap...

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks are increasingly targeting modern factory floors. Recovery from a cyberattack is a complex task that involves identifying the root causes of the attack in order to thoroughly cleanse the compromised systems and remedy all vulnerabilities. As a result, the provenance analysis, which can correlate individual attack footprints and thus "connect the dots", is v...

This is a hybrid event. Students are encouraged to attend in person: STEW G52(Suite 050B) Commercial or defense systems are often developed first to meet a mission or customer need. Security of many of these systems is often developed at a component level by each components product team. The product teams often maintain robust security for their component within the system, but security gaps begin...

The challenge of building a security program is that there are too many things you could be doing, and that creates a challenge for security leaders to decide on which things they should do next. All too often companies pivot from fighting one fire to another fire. They end up cobbling together a security program with duct tape, bailing wire, and a handful of solutions implemented as a reaction to...

 This is a hybrid event. Students are encouraged to attend in person: STEW 209. Operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) need innovative cybersecurity solutions that go beyond compliance-based security controls in order to be more resilient against increasing cyber threats.  This talk describes MITRE Infrastructure Susceptibility Analysis (ISA) that helps ICS/OT organizatio...

During the last several years, there has been growing concern that the development of quantum computers could undermine the public-key cryptography that is a fundamental pillar of security on the Internet. Recently, the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology has released draft standards for post-quantum encryption algorithms that can replace the existing, and potentially...