CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

Can we automatically and provably quantify and control the information leakage from a black-box processing? From a statistical inference standpoint, in this talk, I will start from a unified framework to summarize existing privacy definitions based on input-independent  indistinguishability and unravel the fundamental challenges in crafting privacy proof for general data processing. Yet, the lands...

The current largest challenge in ML-based malware detection is maintaining high detection rates while samples evolve, causing classifiers to drift. What is the best way to solve this problem? In this talk, Dr. Botacin presents two views on the problem: the scientific and the engineering. In the first part of the talk, Dr. Botacin discusses how to make ML-based drift detectors explainable. The talk...

Trust in modern AI systems hinges on understanding how they learn—and, increasingly, how they can forget. This talk develops a geometric view of trustworthiness that unifies structure-aware optimization, stability analysis, and the emerging science of unlearning. I will begin by revisiting the role of sharpness and flatness in shaping both generalization and sample sensitivity, showing how the geo...

This seminar examines the challenges of securing Linux (and legacy UNIX) systems in heterogenous enterprise environments, where cohabitant Windows infrastructure often dictates corporate security focus, resources, and tooling. Drawing on experiences across academia, large industry, and more modestly-sized startups, Sharp will highlight practical strategies, open source approaches, and mindset shif...

In the UK one of the great global car brands is on the verge of bankruptcy this month due to a single cyber-attack with the consequence of a potential loss of 130,000 jobs. Jaguar Land Rover is seeking a government bail-out to survive. In this first of a series of seminars delivered from the founder of a cybersecurity company in the same city where Jaguar Land Rover is reeling from this attack, we...

AI is enabling developers and non-developers (product managers, solutions engineers) to write more lines of code than even before. Businesses are under pressure to ship these AI built products to stay competitive while still meeting regulatory requirements. Can AI solve this problem? In this talk, we will explore the opportunities and pitfalls to use AI agents for DevSecOps. About the speaker: San...

We need to understand AI, what's here and what's coming, at a deep and ever-deepening level. This is a genuine inflection point for our society. It's like the internet squared except the rate of adoption is much higher. We don't have decades to figure this out. ... This is not a technical talk. The focus is on the approaches we need to adopt to work in tandem with AIs. It's about thinking differen...

End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging on the Internet allows encrypted messages to be sent from one sender to one or multiple recipients in a way that cannot be decrypted by anybody else - arguably not even the messaging service provider itself. The protocol of choice is Signal that invokes and puts in place several cryptographic primitives in new and ingenious ways. Besides the messenger of the s...

Cybersecurity stands at a historic inflection point, where converged forces are reshaping how we think about digital defense. In this discussion, Kyndryl's Global Security & Resiliency Leader Kris Lovejoy will share five key predictions for how AI-driven threats, workforce disruption, geopolitical fragmentation, quantum computing, and infrastructure vulnerabilities will redefine how we secure...

The U.S. military possesses a deep and extensive body of cyber expertise in uniform in the National Guard and Reserve force in particular. Leveraging this expertise effectively, both in a way that is productive for the military, and that is fulfilling and meaningful for the servicemember — which results in benefits for recruiting, retention, and continued development of this expertise — has been a...

People talk quite a lot about things like 'shift left" that make it sound as if it is a new concept -- sold at your finer consultancies -- to build things properly in the first place. After two decades of incident response, smoke jumping and Tech Debt burndowns, I think it's time to talk about the way teams can build security not just into the product but into the company culture by examining some...

The DNS resolution path by which the world's internet content consumers locate the world's internet content producers has been under continuous attack since the earliest days of Internet commercialization and privatization. Much work has recently and is currently being invested to protect this vital source of Personally Identifiable Information -- but by whom, and why, and how? Let's discuss. Abou...

About the speaker: Recorded: 04/23/2025 CERIAS Security Seminar at Purdue University Using Side-Channels for Critical Infrastructure Protection Tristen Mullins, ORNL Dr. Tristen Mullins is a cybersecurity professional specializing in side-channel analysis, cyber-physical systems security, and supply chain integrity. Currently an R&D Associate and Signal Processing Engineer at Oak Ridge Nationa...

The purpose of Russian hacking and their concept of cyber war is conceptually and practically different from Western strategies.  This talk will focus on understanding why Russia uses cyber tools to further strategic interests, how they do it (by examining the 2016 interference in the U.S. presidential election and the NotPetya cases), and who does it. About the speaker: Dr. Richard Love is curren...

This talk explores how the principles and practices of the American public health system can inform and enhance modern cybersecurity strategies. Drawing on insights from our recent CRA Quad Paper, we examine the parallels between public health methodologies and the challenges faced in today's digital landscape. By analyzing historical responses to public health crises, we identify strategies for i...

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the lines between Information Technology (IT), Operational Technology (OT), and the Internet of Things (IoT) have become increasingly blurred. While these domains were once distinct, they now converge into a single, interconnected technology ecosystem—one that presents both unprecedented opportunities and critical security challenges. In this keynote,...

As companies expand AI adoption to accelerate business growth, they face an evolving landscape of security risks and regulatory uncertainty. With guidelines and policies still taking shape, organizations must balance innovation with responsibility, ensuring AI is both secure and aligned with emerging standards. This session will explore the challenges and risks organizations encounter on their AI...

In February 2024, Gladstone AI produced a report for the Department of State, which opens by stating that "The recent explosion of progress in advanced artificial intelligence … is creating entirely new categories of weapons of mass destruction-like and weapons of mass destruction-enabling catastrophic risk." To clarify further, they define catastrophic risk as "catastrophic events up to and inclu...

Professional certifications have become a defining feature of the cybersecurity industry, promising enhanced career prospects, higher salaries, and professional credibility. But do they truly deliver on these promises, or are there hidden drawbacks to pursuing them? This presentation takes a deep dive into the dual-edged nature of certifications like CISSP, CISM, CEH, and CompTIA Security+, analyz...

This session explores the foundational concepts and practical applications of Zero Trust Architectures (ZTA) and Digital Trust Frameworks (DTF), two paradigms gaining traction in cybersecurity. While Zero Trust challenges the traditional notion of trust by enforcing strict access controls and authentication measures, Digital Trust seeks to build confidence through data integrity, privacy, and ethi...

This talk will look at how systems are secured at a practical engineering level and the science of risk. As we try to engineer secure systems, what are we trying to achieve and how can we do that? Modern threat modeling offers some practical approaches we can apply today. The limits of those approaches are important, and we'll look at how risk management seems to be treated as an axiom, some histo...

Facing increasingly sophisticated attacks from external adversaries, networked systems owners have to judiciously allocate their limited security budget to reduce their cyber risks. However, when modeling human decision-making, behavioral economics has shown that humans consistently deviate from classical models of decision-making. Most notably, prospect theory, for which Kahneman and Tversky won...

Safety and security-critical systems require extensive test and evaluation, but existing high assurance test methods are based on structural coverage criteria that do not apply to many black box AI and machine learning components.   AI/ML systems make decisions based on training data rather than conventionally programmed functions.  Autonomous systems that rely on these components therefore requir...

Information virality is an increasingly important topic in modern media environments, but it often remains overlooked in discussions about information security. This presentation will explain why information virality is a cybersecurity concern and how it can be exploited to manipulate public discourse. By utilizing theories from prominent cultural psychologists and employing natural language proce...

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is a cryptographic primitive that enables a client to retrieve a record from a database hosted by one or more untrusted servers without revealing which record was accessed. It has a wide range of applications, including private web search, private DNS, lightweight cryptocurrency clients, and more. While many existing PIR protocols assume that servers are honest...