On January 13th, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held an orientation webinar as an introduction for a CCC visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security to be held in the summer of 2022 (exact date and location TBD). Hosted by workshop organizers Simha Sethumadhavan (Columbia University) and Tim Sherwood (University of California Santa Barbara), the orientation consisted of pre-recorded presentations and a Q&A with the speakers. The slide deck, pre-recorded presentation video, recording of the Q&A session and a transcript of the Q&A are linked and posted on the workshop webpage. The orientation outlined the goals of the workshop and expanded on what the organizers are looking for […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released a new program Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD) to aid Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers in testing their models’ defenses against attacks. A team of large technology players from academia and industry, including IBM, MITRE, University of Chicago and Google Research collaborated to make a set of open source testing tools. The tools, ranging from a virtual evaluation testbed, a benchmark dataset, and “test dummies” help identify vulnerabilities in AI systems and make systems more robust against an increasingly complex range of attacks. The growing field of Machine Learning (ML) enables a large range of opportunities for societal and technological growth, but […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Evidence-Based Elections white paper, written by Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Research), Philip B. Stark (University of California, Berkeley), Vanessa Teague (Australian National University), Melanie Volkamer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), and Dan Wallach (Rice University).  This white paper highlights the need for evidence-based elections, which can convince people that the results of elections are accurate, and suggests several technologies that could play a role in this, mostly focused on risk-limiting audits and end-to-end verifiability.  “A risk-limiting audit (RLA) is any procedure with a known minimum chance of correcting the reported electoral outcome if the reported electoral outcome is wrong—that is, if […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security during the summer of 2022 (exact date and location TBD). We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Workshop organizers Simha Sethumadhavan (Columbia University) and Tim Sherwood (University of California Santa Barbara) will host an orientation webinar from 1 – 2:30 PM ET on Thursday, January 13th, 2022 to outline the goals of the workshop and expand on what they are looking for in the white papers. Following the pre-recorded presentations there will be an opportunity for Q&A with the speakers. Register to attend the […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security during the summer of 2022 (exact date and location TBD). We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. From election security to critical health applications, trustworthy hardware is the bedrock of a modern free and healthy society. Once niche and arcane, the field of hardware security has recently become one of the most pressing issues in cybersecurity. Microarchitectural side channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown have shown how pervasive, dangerous, and hard-to-fix a hardware attack could be; integrity attacks such as Rowhammer and CLKSCREW show […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), along with Code 8.7, is pleased to announce the release of the CCC / Code 8.7 Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery Workshop Report. This March 2020 workshop brought together over 50 members of the computing research community along with anti-slavery practitioners and survivors to lay out a research roadmap aimed at applying AI to the fight against human trafficking.  The primary goal was to explore ways in which long-range research in artificial intelligence (AI) could be applied to the fight against human trafficking. Building on the kickoff Code 8.7 conference held at the headquarters of the United Nations in February 2019, the […]