Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) Blog

Category: CS

OISE/IRES Project to Fund International Research Experiences for Grad Students

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Professor Soner Onder, Computer Science, has been awarded $150K of a $300K project funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) and the International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) programs, both units of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The remaining project share was awarded to Florida State University (FSU).

The project provides international research experiences for eight Michigan Tech PhD students (and eight FSU students), providing a stipend, travel expenses, and living expenses while they pursue research in Norway for ten weeks in each of three summers.

The students will be working with Dr. Onder’s collaborators at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Prof. Magnus Jahre and Prof. Magnus Själander. The two institutions are pursuing joint interdisciplinary work involving compilers and architecture . The work is expected to result in several joint research publications.

“I believe this project will help improve our international recognition and stature as a major research institution,” Dr. Onder says.

Abstract

When the technology for computers advance and programs execute faster, more computer applications become possible. This project will enable Florida State University (FSU) and Michigan Technology University (MTU) students to visit the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) to conduct research that will allow the performance and energy efficiency of computer applications to be automatically improved. Over the three years of this project, 16 FSU and MTU students (in cohorts of five, five, and six) will visit NTNU, which is in Trondheim, Norway, for a period of 10 weeks during May, June, and July. While in residence, the students will work closely with the faculty, postdoctoral associates, and graduate students in the research groups of Professors Magnus Sjalander and Magnus Jahre who are affiliated with the Computer Architecture Laboratory (CAL) at NTNU. The participating FSU and MTU students will not only increase their research knowledge, but will also become more globally engaged and better prepared to work in a culturally diverse, international environment.

The era of improving processor performance without innovations in computer architecture or compilers is over since increasing the clock rate for computers has not been possible in recent years due to thermal limitations. However, manually modifying programs to efficiently exploit computer architectures is time consuming, error prone, and not portable to other systems. The most effective way to improve application performance is to automatically exploit architectural features without the intervention of the application developers. Our focus will be on automatically achieving high performance and energy efficiency by generating code to exploit existing and proposed architectural features at the machine instruction level. We propose to develop the compilation tools to facilitate the process of automatically generating code to exploit these proposed architectural features and to develop the simulation tools to evaluate the impact on both performance and energy efficiency.

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is the second largest university in Norway and is consistently ranked among the top one percent of universities world-wide; their current ranking is 101st.

Office of International Science & Engineering (OISE) is the NSF focal point for international science and engineering activities both inside and outside NSF. OISE’s focuses on three activities: (1) promoting the development of a globally competent U.S. workforce, (2) facilitating and supporting international partnerships and networks to leverage NSF and foreign resources, and (3) providing opportunities for U.S. leadership to shape the global science and engineering agenda.

The International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) program supports international research and research-related activities for U.S. science and engineering students. The IRES program contributes to development of a diverse, globally engaged workforce with world-class skills. IRES focuses on active research participation by undergraduate and/or graduate students in high quality international research, education and professional development experiences in NSF-funded research areas.

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Michigan Tech Team Ranks #3 in Spring 2021 NCL Power Rankings

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Michigan Tech ranks number three (3) in the Spring 2021 National Cyber League’s Cyber Power Rankings, rising 12 points from a Fall 2020 ranking of 15. One hundred (100) teams were ranked.

In the NCL cyber-competitions, thousands of students from hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide are challenged to identify hackers from forensic data, pentest and audit vulnerable websites, recover from ransomware attacks, and more.

Three factors are considered in a school’s annual Cyber Power Ranking. In descending magnitude of weight, they are:

  • The school’s top performing team during the Team Game
  • The school’s top performing student during the Individual Game
  • The number of participating students from the school, with additional consideration given to better student performance during the Individual Game

Schools are ranked based on their top team performance, their top student’s individual performance, and the aggregate individual performance of their students. The rankings represent the ability of students from these schools to perform real-world cybersecurity tasks on the Cyber Skyline platform.

See how the NCL competitions work.

View the full list of NCL rankings.

The Cyber Power Rankings were created by Cyber Skyline in partnership with the National Cyber League (NCL). Every year, over 10,000 students from more than 300 colleges and universities across the US participate in the NCL competitions.

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Start Your Cybersecurity Career with this Generous CyberCorps Scholarship

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Apply now for Michigan Tech’s 2021-22 cohort of Cybersecurity Scholars and jumpstart your cybersecurity career!

The deadline to apply is June 1, 2021.

This generous scholarship opportunity provides up to three years of tuition and annual stipend.

Then, following completion of your degree, you’ll work in a cybersecurity-related position for a federal, state, local, or tribal agency for up to three years– a period equal to the length of your scholarship.

See full guidelines, requirements, and application information on the SFS website: mtu.edu/sfs.

Eligible Degree Programs

  1. BS in Cybersecurity (CyS)
  2. BS in Computer Network and System Administration (CNSA)
  3. BS in Computer Science (CS)
  4. BS in Software Engineering (SE)
  5. BS in Computer Engineering (CpE)
  6. BS in Electrical Engineering (EE)
  7. BS in Management Information Systems (MIS)
  8. MS in Cybersecurity

Ready to apply? Visit mtu.edu/sfs

Questions? Email sfs@mtu.edu

Or Contact: Project PI Profesor Yu Cai, or any key faculty member: Professor Jean Mayo, Professor Todd O. Arney, Professor Bo Chen, Professor Chee-Wooi Ten, Professor Kedmon N. Hungwe, and Dr. Laura Kasson Fiss.

The Michigan Tech SFS Program

The SFS program at Michigan Tech involves multiple programs and departments, including the College of Computing and its departments of Applied Computing and Computer Science; the College of Engineering’s Department of  Electrical and Computer Engineering; and the College of Business’s Management Information Systems B.S. program. 

“The U.S. is facing a significant shortage of well-trained and well-prepared cybersecurity professionals,” said Dr. Yu Cai, professor of applied computing and the principal investigator of the grant. “This new scholarship will continue to develop Michigan Tech’s national and international reputation as a leader and innovator in cybersecurity education, research and outreach activities.”

The five-year, $3.3 million NSF grant provides up to three years of full scholarship support for 20 Michigan Tech undergraduate and graduate students.

About the NSF Scholarship

Protecting worldwide digital infrastructure has become an urgent focus of industry and government. And employment in this sector is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years.

In response, the National Science Foundation CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program was introduced as a nationwide program to recruit and train the next generation of information technology professionals, industrial control system security professionals, and security managers.

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Conference on Applied Cryptography: Call for Participation

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The 2021 EAI International Conference on Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications (AC3 2021) takes place May 15-16, 2021.

Register for the virtual conference here.

Dr. Bo Chen, Computer Science, founding general chair of the new EAI conference, says the conference has brought together researchers, developers and practitioners from around the world who will focus on, discuss, and explore the area of applied cryptography in computer and communication systems.

Conference Topics

Conference topics include all aspects of applied cryptography, including symmetric cryptography, public-key cryptography, cryptographic protocols, cryptographic implementations, cryptographic standards and practices, as well as using cryptography to solve real-world problems.

Technical Program

The AC3 2021 technical program includes four main conference tracks at which 11 papers will be presented virtually in oral presentations.

  • Track 1 – Blockchain
  • Track 2 – Authentication
  • Track 3 – Secure Computation
  • 4 – Practical Crypto Application. Aside from the high-quality technical paper presentations, the technical program also features two keynote speeches, and one technical workshop.

Keynotes

The two keynote speeches will be delivered by Prof. Kui Ren (ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow), Zhejiang University, China; and IEEE Fellow Prof. Robert Deng, Singapore Management University.

Workshop

A workshop, the First International Workshop on Security for Internet of Things (IOTS 2021), includes four technical papers which aim to develop cryptographic techniques for ensuring the IoT security. The conference, originally planned to be held in Xiamen China, was moved it online for the health and safety of participants.

Register to participate in the virtual conference here. Use the “Sign up for free access to the livestream” option.

European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) is an international professional community and a nonprofit organization. The goal of EAI is to empower the global ICT research and innovation community, and to promote cooperation between European and International ICT communities.

EAI Conferences span the globe with opportunities to meet, explore, and contribute to the world of ICT research. With 100+ annual events (including MobiQuitous, SecureComm, etc.), EAI is one of the world’s most prolific scientific communities.

EAI Conferences are published via Springer’s LNICST and EAI’s EUDL, and they are indexed in all leading indexing services, including EI, ISI, Scopus, CrossRef, Google Scholar, dblp, MAS, EBSCO, Microsoft Academic Search, CiteSeerX, and more.

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Jidong Xiao, Boise State University, to Present Talk May 12

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Jidong Xiao, an assistant professor in the computer science department at Boise State University, will present a talk on Wednesday, May 12, at 3:00 p.m.

Dr. Xiao’s research focuses on computer security, especially computer system security and cloud security.

In his talk, “Identifying New Threats in Cloud Environments,” Dr. Xiao will present two research projects focusing on a concept called virtual machine extrospection and a new type of rootkit, which allows attackers to perform active or passive attacks in a nested virtualization environment.

Join the virtual talk here.

Talk Title

Identifying New Threats in Cloud Environments

Talk Abstract

Cloud computing has become prevalent over the past decade. While individuals and organizations rely on cloud computing more and more, various security problems in cloud platforms are discovered. In this talk, I will present two research projects. In the first project, I will present a concept called virtual machine extrospection, in which attackers or cloud customers collect sensitive information about the physical machine from within a virtual machine. In the second project, I will present a new type of rootkit, which allows attackers to perform active or passive attacks in a nested virtualization environment, and then I will describe our detection approach. At the end of the talk, I will briefly discuss my future research projects and plans.

Biography

Dr. Jidong Xiao is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Boise State University. His research focuses on computer security, especially computer system security and cloud security. He received his PhD degree in computer science from the College of William and Mary. Prior to joining Boise State University, he spent approximately 5 years in industry working at Intel and Symantec.

Dr. Xiao’s research was recognized in different venues, including publications that won the best paper award at the USENIX Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA) 2015, won the distinguished poster award at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2016, and won the best paper award nomination at the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2020. Dr. Xiao has been awarded several grants by the NSF, NSA, and the Army Research Office (ARO).

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Jinging Yao, NJ Inst. of Technology, to Present Talk May 11

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Jingjing Yao, a PhD candidate at New Jersey Institute of Technology, will present a talk on Tuesday, May 11, at 3:00 p.m,.

In her talk, “Intelligent and Secure Fog-Aided Internet of Drones,” Yao discusses the utilization of energy harvesting technology to charge drone batteries and investigate wireless power control to adjust the drone wireless transmission power to reduce drone energy consumption.

Yao’s research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Drones (IoD), Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning, Cybersecurity, Mobile Edge Computing/Caching, and Energy Harvesting.

Join the virtual talk here.

Talk Title

Intelligent and Secure Fog-Aided Internet of Drones

Talk Abstract

Internet of drones (IoD), which deploys several drones in the air to collect ground information and send them to the IoD gateway for further processing, can be applied in traffic surveillance and disaster rescue. Fog-aided IoD provisions future events prediction and image classification by machine learning technologies, where massive training data are collected by drones and analyzed in the fog node. However, the performance of IoD is greatly affected by drones’ battery capacities. Also, aggregating all data in the fog node may incur huge network traffic and drone data privacy leakage. The speaker will share her vision and research to address these two challenges.

In this talk, the speaker utilizes energy harvesting technology to charge drone batteries and investigate wireless power control to adjust the drone wireless transmission power to reduce drone energy consumption. The joint optimization of power control and energy harvesting scheduling is investigated in time-varying IoD networks to minimize the long-term average system energy cost constrained by the drone battery capacities and quality of service (QoS) requirements. A modified actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm is designed to address the joint optimization problem in time-varying IoD networks.

To prevent the privacy leakage of IoD, the speaker utilizes federated learning (FL) by performing local training in drones and sharing all training model parameters in the fog node without uploading drone raw data. However, drone privacy can still be divulged to ground eavesdroppers by wiretapping and analyzing uploaded parameters during the FL training process. The power control problem is hence investigated to maximize the FL system security rate constrained by drone battery capacities and the FL training time requirement. An algorithm with low computational complexity is then designed to tackle the security rate maximization problem and its performance is demonstrated by extensive simulations.

Biography

Jingjing Yao is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). She will receive her Ph.D. degree from NJIT in May 2021.

She received the M.E. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and the B.E. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from the Dalian University of Technology (DUT).

She has published 13 first-author journal articles and 7 first-author conference papers. Her research interests include Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Drones (IoD), Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning, Cybersecurity, Mobile Edge Computing/Caching, and Energy Harvesting.

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Tara Salman, Washington Univ., to Present Talk April 27

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Tara Salman, a final-year PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, will present a talk on Tuesday, April 27, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.

In her talk, “A Collaborative Knowledge-Based Security Solution using Blockchains,” she will present her work on redesigning the blockchains and building a collaborative, distributed, intelligent, and hostile solution that can be used for security purposes.

Talk Title

A Collaborative Knowledge-Based Security Solution using Blockchains

Talk Abstract

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have recently gained wide adaptation in building intelligent yet simple and proactive security solutions such as intrusion identification, malware detection, and threat intelligence. With the increased risk and severity of cyber-attacks and the distributed nature of modern threats and vulnerabilities, it becomes critical to pose a distributed intelligent solution that evaluates the systems’ and networks’ security collaboratively. Blockchain, as a decade-old successful distributed ledger technology, has the potential to build such collaborative solutions. However, to be used for such solutions, the technology needs to be extended so that it can intelligently process the stored information and achieve a collective decision about security risks or threats that might target a system.

In this talk, I will present our work on redesigning the blockchains and build a collaborative, distributed, intelligent, and hostile solution that can be used for security purposes. In particular, we will discuss our work on (1) extending blockchains for general collaborative decision-making applications, where knowledge should be made out of decisions, risks, or any information stored on the blockchain; (2) applying the proposed extensions to security applications such as malware detection and threat intelligence.

Biography

Tara Salman is a final year Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is advised by Raj Jain. She previously received her MS and BSc degrees from Qatar University in 2015 and 2012, respectively. Her research aims to integrate state-of-the-art technologies to provide scalable, collaborative, and intelligent cybersecurity solutions.

Her recent work focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, blockchains, and security applications. The work spans several fields, including blockchain technology, security, machine learning, and deep learning applications, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. She has been selected for the EECS Rising Star in UC Berkeley 2020. Her research has been published in more than twenty internationally recognized conferences and journals and supported by national and international funds.

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Xinyu Lei, Michigan State, to Present Talk April 29

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Xinyu Lei, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, will present a talk on Thursday, April 29, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.

In his talk, “Secure and Efficient Queries Processing in Cloud Computing,” Lei will discuss his work developing new techniques to support secure and efficient queries processing in cloud storage.

Title

Secure and Efficient Queries Processing in Cloud Computing

Abstract

With the advent of cloud computing, data owners are motivated to outsource their databases to the commercial public cloud for storage. The public cloud with database-as-a-service (DBaaS) model has many benefits (including lower cost, better performance, and higher flexibility). However, hosting the datasets on the commercial public cloud deprives the data owners’ direct control over their databases, which brings in security concerns. For example, the corrupted cloud employees may spy the data owner’s commercial valuable databases and sell them for money. To protect data privacy, the sensitive database must be encrypted before outsourcing to the cloud. However, it becomes hard to perform efficient queries (e.g., keyword query) processing over the encrypted database.

In this talk, I focus on developing new techniques to support secure and efficient queries processing in cloud storage. An index-aid approach is proposed to address the problem. In my approach, the data items are formally encrypted, and a secure index is generated for efficient queries processing. The cloud can perform queries directly over the secure index rather than the encrypted data items. The secure index is constructed based on a new data structure named random Bloom filter. Then, multiple random Bloom filters are organized into a binary tree structure to support fast query processing. The proposed approach can achieve data privacy, index privacy, search token privacy, and fast query processing simultaneously.

Biography

Xinyu Lei is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer science and Engineering at Michigan State University. He once worked as a research assistant in Texas A&M University at Qatar and Ford Motor Company. He has research interests in cybersecurity problems in different computer systems (including IoT, blockchain, cloud computing). He has published 20+ papers with 600+ citations. His work has been published on top-tier conferences and journals such as ACM MobiSys, ACM CodaSpy, IEEE ICDE, IEEE ICDCS, etc.

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Spend 1010 with Dr. Brian Yuan, April 29

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You are invited to spend one-zero-one-zero—that is, ten—minutes with Dr. Brian Yuan on Thursday, April 29, at 4:30 p.m. EST.

Dr. Yuan is an assistant professor in both the Applied Computing and Computer Science departments. His areas of expertise include machine learning, security and privacy, and cloud computing.

Yuan will discuss his research, the Applied Computing and Computer Science departments, and answer questions.

Dr. Yuan earned his PhD in Computer Science at University of Florida.

We look forward to spending 1010 minutes with you!

Visit the 1010 with … webpage here.

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