The University of Maine's National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded collaborative research project, “KIPPER: A Scalable Learning-Guided Hardware IP Protection Platform,” will address the threat of confidentiality breaches in semiconductor design, including reverse engineering and Intellectual Property (IP) theft. The KIPPER project will create a new hardware security framework that incorporates Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. The AI tools will automate vulnerability detection and simulate security researchers' identification of attack vectors and causes.

Researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt have developed a method called "Encrypted Multi-Channel Communication" (EMC2) to secure sensitive messages by distributing trust across multiple communication channels. EMC2 takes advantage of the modern proliferation of messaging apps to distribute encrypted message parts across several independent communication channels. This article continues to discuss the researchers' work to enable better protection for sending sensitive information.

Anivesh Sinha, a master's student in Information Science at Penn State Great Valley, is collaborating with a team of faculty and other students to conduct a Presidential Public Impact Research Project to help Pennsylvania nonprofit organizations improve their cybersecurity. Sinha points out that nonprofits usually have fewer resources than for-profit organizations, which can lead to poor information security controls and a lack of expertise to implement advanced security measures. This article continues to discuss the project to bolster cybersecurity for nonprofit organizations.

Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, are addressing the issue of practical quantum computers breaking classical encryption before it becomes an actual problem. They presented a paper titled  "Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Network Instrument: Measuring PQC Adoption Rates and Identifying Migration Pathways" that proposes the design of a novel PQC network instrument housed at NCSA and the University of Illinois, and incorporated as a part of the FABRIC testbed.

Researchers at Charles Darwin University (CDU) hacked into an oximeter, a smartwatch, and a smart peak flow meter to explore the potential risks and vulnerabilities of these Internet-connected medical devices. According to the study's co-author, Dr. Bharanidharan Shanmugam, the team attacked each device using three different techniques. This article continues to discuss the study on the vulnerability of health monitoring devices to hacking.

Georgia Tech developed a postmortem cybersecurity forensic tool named "AI Psychiatry" (AiP) that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recover the original Deep Learning (DL) models a compromised machine, such as a self-driving car, runs on and determine where the fatal error emerged. Using AiP, cyber investigators can immediately see the whole picture. This article continues to discuss the goals and capabilities of the AiP tool.

Georgia Tech reports "The Sherlock Holmes of AI"

Researchers at the University of Waterloo's Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) will receive over $1.5 million in funding from the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) to advance digital security in Canada.

The student-led program "CodeHoppers," sponsored by Augusta University's (AU) School of Computer and Cyber Sciences, is returning. CodeHoppers, founded in 2017 by AU's chapter of "Girls Who Code," aims to provide a fun, friendly, and inclusive environment for girls in sixth through 12th grades. The program covers basic coding concepts, webpage principles, hacking ethics, cybersecurity, and more. This article continues to discuss the success and goals of the CodeHoppers program.

Selections by dgoff

​Pub Crawl summarizes sets of publications that have been peer-reviewed and presented at Science of Security (SoS) conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are chosen for their usefulness for current researchers. Select the topic name to view the corresponding list of publications. Submissions and suggestions are welcome.

According to security researchers at Veracode, security debt, flaws that remain unfixed for longer than a year, exists in 76% of organizations in the financial services sector, with 50% of organizations carrying critical security debt.  During the study, researchers found that 40% of all applications in the financial sector have security debt, which is slightly better than the cross-industry average of 42%.  In addition, just 5.5% of financial sector applications are flaw-free, compared to 5.9% across other industries.