talk: From UMBC to CEO

The Alex. Brown Center For Entrepreneurship
The Raymond V. Haysbert, Sr. Entrepreneurship Lecture Series
presents

From UMBC to CEO

Delali Dzirasa, Fearless
UMBC ‘04, BS Computer Engineering

12:00-1:00 pm Wednesday, 30 September 2020
online via Webex

Come listen to Delali, CEO and Founder of Fearless, talk about his entrepreneurial journey after he left UMBC. Every day Delali strives to make a difference in technology and in his surrounding community. He is passionate about increasing the rate of city youth heading into STEM fields and works closely with city nonprofits to provide funding and mentorship programs in city schools, as well as other educator initiatives. Fearless is a full stack digital services firm in Baltimore, Maryland with a mission to create software with a soul – tools that empower communities and make a difference. Fearless delivers sleek, modern, and user-friendly software designed to push the boundaries of possibility, to create a world where good software powers the things that matter.

Every day Delali strives to make a difference in technology and in his surrounding community. He is passionate about increasing the rate of city youth heading into STEM fields and works closely with city nonprofits to provide funding and mentorship programs in city schools, as well as other educator initiatives.

Delali Dzirasa ‘04 is the CEO and Founder, of Fearless. He received a B.S. in computer engineering from UMBC in 2004. His awards and affiliations include UMBC Outstanding Young Alumni of the Year, 2011; Board Member, Downtown Partnership of Baltimore; Board Member, UMBC College of Engineering & Information Technology; Co-Founder / Chair DevOpsDays, Baltimore; BBJ’s 40 under 40, 2017; Co-Founder, Digital Services Coalition, 2018; Co-Founder, Hack Baltimore, 2018; GBC LEADERship class of 2018; BBJ’s National List of Influential 100; Young Executives, 2018; and BBJ’s Tech 10, 2019.

For more information, see this flyer

The Raymond V. Haysbert, Sr. Entrepreneurship Lecture Series provides a platform for successful entrepreneurs to candidly share their experiences and insights with UMBC students, faculty, alumni and the Baltimore business community. The series highlights experiences, lessons learned and unique issues and challenges faced by entrepreneurs in the creation of a new enterprise.

talk: Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory, 12-1 Fri 9/18

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Psychometric Evaluation of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory

Seth Poulsen

Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

12:00noon–1pm, Friday, September 18, 2020

https://umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman

Joint work with Geoffrey Herman, Alan Sherman, Linda Oliva, Peter Peterson, Enis Golaszewski, Travis Scheponik, and Akshita Gorti.

We present a psychometric evaluation of a revised version of the Cybersecurity Concept Inventory (CCI) completed by 355 students from 29 colleges and universities. The CCI is a conceptual test of understanding created to enable research on instruction quality in cybersecurity education. This work extends previous expert review and small-scale pilot testing of the CCI. Results show that the CCI aligns with a curriculum many instructors expect from an introductory cybersecurity course, and that it is a valid and reliable tool for assessing what cybersecurity conceptual knowledge students learned.

Seth Poulsen is a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’m interested in Computing Education, Programming Language design and implementation, Math Education, and any interesting intersections of the above. Previously, he was a Software Engineer at Amazon.com, working on Kindle Web Rendering and the Kindle Lite Android app. email: ,

Support for this research was provided in part by the U.S. Department of Defense under CAE-R grants H98230-15-1-0294, H98230-15-1-0273, H98230-17-1-0349, H98230-17-1-0347; and by the National Science Foundation under UMBC SFS grants DGE-1241576, 1753681, and SFS Capacity Grants DGE-1819521, 1820531. For more on the educational Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05248.pdf

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1pm. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings:

  • Oct. 2, TBA [possibly: security of payment infrastructure]
  • Oct. 16, TBA [possibly: Jonathan Katz (GMU)]
  • Oct. 30, TBA
  • Nov. 13, TBA, [possibly: David R Imbordino (NSA), Security of the 2020 presidential election]
  • Dec. 11, TBA, [possibly: Peter A. H. Peterson (Univ. of Minnesota Duluth), Adversarial Thinking]

UMBC Data Science Meetup: Data Analytics Challenges in Healthcare

Best Practices for Handling Data Analytics Challenges in Healthcare

Aaron Wilkowitz
Customer Engineer, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Google

5:30 – 7:00 pm EDT, Tuesday, 15 September 2020
free and online; register here to get the link

Aaron specializes in Healthcare & Federal and has worked with numerous private companies & federal agencies around reaching better healthcare outcomes and minimizing fraud through smarter data. Previously Aaron worked at a predictive analytics firm APT helping Fortune 200 companies drive to better data-driven decisions.

Agenda
5:30 – 5:35 Welcome
5:35 – 6:30 Aaron Wilkowitz Talk
6:30 – 6:45 Q&A

talk: Matt Green on Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Protocols, 12-1 EDT Fri. 9/4, online

 

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Protocols 

Professor Matthew Green
Johns Hopkins University

12:00-1:00 pm Friday, 4 September 2020
WebEx: http://umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman  

We investigate the problem of automating the development of adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks on systems that contain vulnerable format oracles. Rather than simply automate the execution of known attacks, we consider a more challenging problem: to programmatically derive a novel attack strategy, given only a machine-readable description of the plaintext verification function and the malleability characteristics of the encryption scheme. We present a new set of algorithms that use SAT and SMT solvers to reason deeply over the design of the system, producing an automated attack strategy that can decrypt protected messages entirely.

Matthew Green is an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. His research includes techniques for privacy-enhanced information storage, anonymous payment systems, and bilinear map- based cryptography. He is one of the creators of the Zerocash protocol, which is used by the Zcash cryptocurrency, and a founder of an encryption startup Zeutro. He was formerly a partner in Independent Security Evaluators, a custom security evaluation and design consultancy, and currently consults independently. From 1999-2003, he served as a senior technical staff member at AT&T Laboratories/Research in Florham Park, NJ. email: Dr. Green writes a popular blog on applied cryptography, A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering, A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Host: Alan T. Sherman,, . Support for this event was provided in part by the NSF under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings:

  • The Cyber Defense Lab hosts biweekly talks on Fridays 12-1pm.

talk: Identifying and Addressing Concerning Behavior in the Digital Age, 12-1 Fri 5/8

two secret service agents confer

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Identifying and Addressing Concerning
Behavior in the Digital Age

 

Jason W. Wells
Graduate Student, Cybersecurity MPS
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

12:00–1pm Friday, 8 May 2020, webex

 

The United States Secret Service (USSS) is widely known as the premier law enforcement agency that is charged with protecting some of the most important political figures in the world. Some of these protectees include the President of the United States, the Vice-President, the First Family and Second Family, and Heads of State visiting the United States, to name a few. A major part of the protective mission of the USSS is focused around “protective intelligence,” where agents are trained to identify concerning and threatening behavioral indicators in others, and then to address those issues in a proactive and positive manner and ensure that the community is safe from harm. This proactive methodology has been researched and applied for decades and has a very high rate of success. Now, other law enforcement agencies throughout the country have started to apply this training to their agents and officers. Can these methodologies be used and/or modified to recognize threats in cyberspace as well?

Jason Wells is a former special agent with the United States Secret Service, where he served for nine years from 2005 – 2014. During that time, Mr. Wells was extensively trained in identifying and addressing threat-related and concerning behavioral indicators, and how to address those behaviors in a positive and proactive manner. In 2016, Mr. Wells published his first book Our Path to Safety: A U.S. Secret Service Agent’s Guide to Creating Safe Communities (ISBN-13: 978-0-9982488-0-6) on how the community can identify these behavioral conditions in the same way that federal law enforcement does every day. Mr. Wells earned his undergraduate degree from the Virginia Military Institute and his first graduate degree from Henley-Putnam University in Strategic Security and Protection Management in 2014. Additionally, Mr. Wells has published 11 editorial articles in print media on improving safety and security methodologies in schools and businesses. Currently, he is an SFS scholarship graduate student at UMBC with plans to complete his degree in spring 2020. He and his wife, Blythe, have two children and have lived in Baltimore County since 2008.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Meetings: May 22, Spring SFS Meeting at UMBC, 9:30am-2pm, via WebEx.

talk: Cybersecurity during COVID-19 and other emergencies, 12-1 Tue May 5

talk: Cybersecurity during COVID-19 and other emergencies, 12-1 Tue May 5

The UMBC Center for Cybersecurity (UCYBR) Presents

Cybersecurity during COVID-19 and other emergencies

Dr. Richard Forno
Senior Lecturer, Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
Director, UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Program & Assistant Director, UMBC Center for Cybersecurity

12–1 pm Tuesday, 5 May 2020
online via webex

‘Cyber’ touches many, if not all, parts of society and organizations. However, even in 2020, cybersecurity often still is seen as exclusively a function of IT and not a function of enterprise mission assurance or operational resiliency. Accordingly, operational performance can be compromised by a failure to consider, if not embrace, cybersecurity principles and concerns during crisis planning – which can significantly impede effective crisis response and incident management during actual events and make a bad situation even worse. This talk will discuss the role of cybersecurity and cybersecurity thinking within crisis management and incident handling, with a particular emphasis on maintaining operational resiliency and mission assurance during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Richard Forno is a Senior Lecturer in the UMBC Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, where he directs the UMBC Graduate Cybersecurity Program and serves as the Assistant Director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity. Prior to joining UMBC in 2010, his twenty-year career in operational cybersecurity spanned the government, military, and private sector, including helping build a formal cybersecurity program for the US House of Representatives, serving as the first Chief Security Officer for Network Solutions (then, the global center of the internet DNS system), consulting to Fortune 100 companies, and more. From 2005-12 he was a Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught courses on incident handling for the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC).

Talk: Lance Hoffman (GWU) Cyber Policy Challenges, 12-1pm 4/24 online

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Cyber Policy Challenges

Lance J. Hoffman
Distinguished Professor, George Washington University

12–1:00 pm, Friday, 24 April 2020

remotely via WebEx

System attackers and defenders operate on a constantly changing battlefield, and some of the more serious conflicts involving nation-states could be considered acts of war, though we are still in the early stages of defining war in cyberspace. Policies for security and privacy can vary wildly, and have important personal, national, and global consequences for privacy, free speech, censorship, and other issues. Things get even more complicated with the advent of the Internet of Things, where (mostly unsophisticated) users may think they have more control than they actually do and can make bad mistakes. Various ethical issues related to the development of these systems, including bias in artificial intelligence and what harm to choose when harm is unavoidable have only started to be examined. This talk will provide both historical context and some discussion of topical issues such as Zoombombing and the security of electronic voting systems as compared to mail ballots and traditional voting.

Professor Lance J. Hoffman is the author or editor of numerous articles and five books on computer security and privacy. He developed the first regularly offered course on computer security at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Cyber Security Hall of Fame, Dr. Hoffman institutionalized the ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. He has served on a number of Advisory Committees including those of Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Homeland Security and has testified before Congress on security and privacy-related issues. He is the principal investigator of the CyberCorps program at GWU. Dr. Hoffman earned his Ph. D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, after a B.S. in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL meetings: May 8, Jason Wells (UMBC SFS scholar) law enforcement; May 22, Spring SFS Meeting at UMBC, 9:30am-2pm, ITE456

online talk: Opal Hard Drives for Ransomware Resilience

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Opal Hard Drives for Ransomware Resilience

Russ Fink, Ph.D.
Senior Staff, the Johns Hopkins University / Applied Physics Laboratory

12:00–1 pm,  Friday, 10 April 2020
via WebEx: umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman

 

Ransomware is crippling industry and government alike.  Paying the ransom doesn’t guarantee you’ll get your files back, but it funds the criminals who will continue on. Restoring from traditional network backups takes time, and never gets you back to the system you had before the attack.  In response, we have developed a resilient, local malware restore and recovery capability, capable of quickly restoring OS images onto “bare metal” after an attack or misconfiguration, useful for many applications.

I will discuss the technical details, including a description of the Opal hard drive specification, the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and how we secure secrets needed for WUBU – Wake-Up-Back-Up.  I’ll talk through some of the open-source technologies that we used to build our solution.  WebEx willing, I will give a live demonstration of a ShinoLocker ransomware infection, followed by an “as if nothing ever happened” recovery that takes only ten minutes.

Russ Fink is a senior staff member at the Johns Hopkins University / Applied Physics Laboratory.  His research interests include computational private information retrieval, trusted computing applications, applied cryptography, and enterprise and mission cyber resiliency techniques.  He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from UMBC in 2010 working with Dr. Alan Sherman.  email: 

Host: Alan T. Sherman, . Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681.  The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays.  All meetings are open to the public.  Upcoming CDL Meetings:

  • Apr 24, Lance Hoffman (GWU), policy
  • May 8, Jason Wells (UMBC SFS scholar), law enforcement
  • May 22, Spring SFS Meeting at UMBC, 9:30am-2pm, ITE 456

Online Talks Double Feature: Blockchain and Network Defense, 12-2 Fri 3/27, UMBC

UMBC will hold a double feature with two online security-oriented talks from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm EDT on Friday, March 27. Both talks will be shared via Webex.




From 1:00-2:00 pm, Professor Dr. John Mitchell of Stanford University will give a Lockheed Martin Distinguished lecture on “Will Blockchain Change Everything“. Join the presentation online at 1:00 pm EDT at https://umbc.webex.com/meet/joshi.

Far from serving only as a foundation for cryptocurrency, blockchain technology provides a general framework for trusted distributed ledgers. Over the past few years, their popularity has grown tremendously, as shown by the number of companies and efforts associated with the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, for example. From a technical standpoint, a blockchain combines a storage layer, networking protocols, a consensus layer, and a programmable transaction layer, leveraging cryptographic operations. The distributed state machine paradigm provides atomicity and transaction rollback, while consensus supports distributed availability as well as certain forms of fair access. From an applications perspective, blockchains appeal to distributed networks of independent agents, as arise in supply chain, credentialing, and decentralized financial services. The talk will look at the potential for radical change as well as specific technical challenges associated with verifiable consensus protocols and trustworthy smart contracts.




From 12:00-1:00 pm EDT Col. Dan Yaroslaski, a former operations officer at the Marine Forces Cyberspace Command will talk on “Hard-Learned Lesson in Defense of a Network“. You can join the presentation online at 12:00 pm at https://umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman.

Often network defenders fail to take into account organizational culture when attempting to provide a secure, reliable, and usable enterprise network. Users and process leaders often fall victim to the false allure of the value of networked systems, without asking the question, “Should this be networked?” Collectively, organizations also forget that networks are a combination of the humans who use the network, the personas we all have to form to gain access to this manmade domain, and the interplay of logical and physical network architecture manifested in geographical locations. The value of some simple military principles—including defense-in-depth, mission focus, redundancy, and resiliency versus efficiency—can help a network defender better advise everyone from the “C Suite” decision-makers to the average network user, on how to have a secure network while accepting reasonable limitations.

Webex talk: John Mitchell: Will Blockchain Change Everything? Fri 3/27 1-2pm

Lockheed Martin Distinguished Speaker Series

Will Blockchain Change Everything?

Dr. John Mitchell
Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor
Departments of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering
Stanford University

1:00-2:00pm EST, Friday, 27 March 2020
Webex meeting hosted by Anupam Joshi
https://umbc.webex.com/meet/joshi

Far from serving only as a foundation for cryptocurrency, blockchain technology provides a general framework for trusted distributed ledgers. Over the past few years, their popularity has grown tremendously, as shown by the number of companies and efforts associated with the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, for example. From a technical standpoint, a blockchain combines a storage layer, networking protocols, a consensus layer, and a programmable transaction layer, leveraging cryptographic operations. The distributed state machine paradigm provides atomicity and transaction rollback, while consensus supports distributed availability as well as certain forms of fair access. From an applications perspective, blockchains appeal to distributed networks of independent agents, as arise in supply chain, credentialing, and decentralized financial services. The talk will look at the potential for radical change as well as specific technical challenges associated with verifiable consensus protocols and trustworthy smart contracts.

John Mitchell is the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab, and Professor (by courtesy) of Education. He was Vice Provost at Stanford University from 2012 to 2018. Mitchell’s research focusses on programming languages, computer, and network security, privacy, and education. He has published over 200 research papers, served as editor of eleven journals, including Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Security, and written two books. He has led research projects funded by numerous organizations and served as advisor and consultant to successful small and large companies. His first research project in online learning started in 2009 when he and six undergraduate students built Stanford CourseWare, an innovative platform that served as the foundation for initial flipped classroom experiments at Stanford and helped inspire the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) from Stanford. Professor Mitchell currently serves as Chair of the Stanford Department of Computer Science.

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