On behalf of Federal agencies and the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Cyber Security and Information Assurance Interagency Working Group, the National Coordination Office (NCO) for NITRD just published a request for information on the 2023 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan. Pursuant to the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014, Federal agencies must update the Federal cybersecurity research and development (R&D) strategic plan every four years. The NITRD NCO seeks public input for the 2023 update of the Federal cybersecurity R&D strategic plan. The updated plan will be used to guide and coordinate federally funded research in cybersecurity, including cybersecurity education and workforce development, and the […]

Moshe Y. Vardi, Computer Science Professor at Rice University and Senior Editor of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), wrote an article in the November 2022 issue of the Communications of the ACM magazine, Accountability and Liability in Computing. The article articulates his concerns for the slow progress and lack of conclusive knowledge on how to build secure information systems. Vardi speculates the issue is not due to a lack of technical advancements but a lack of incentives encouraging hardware security developments and solutions. It is becoming vital to address this “market failure” as we become more reliant on technical systems and become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks.  Vardi […]

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 […]

Interested in embedded security? Apply to join the second annual Embedded Security Workshop. The workshop will be hosted by Kevin Fu, former CCC Council Member and principal investigator of the SPQR Lab at the University of Michigan. From their website: “The workshop consists of a diverse set of talks by leading faculty and industrial researchers across the world ranging from medical device security to physics of analog sensor cybersecurity. Students will give lightning pitches of their research and participate in small breakout groups for discussion. The speakers range from industrial researchers to practicing neurosurgeons. The event focuses on improving diversity and inclusion for leading research in embedded security. There is […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Leadership in Embedded Security workshop report. The workshop was organized by former CCC Council Member Kevin Fu (University of Michigan), Wayne Burleson (UMass Amherst), and Farinaz Koushanfar (UC, San Diego). It brought together around fifty academics, industrial researchers, and government agency program managers who work close to the topic of embedded security. The workshop included deep dive group discussions as well as short visionary talks by several international speakers to lend perspectives on successful strategies for funding embedded security research overseas. The report, titled Grand Challenges for Embedded Security Research in a Connected World, focuses on the challenges and potential research opportunities across five […]

Over the last twenty years, the proliferation of Internet access, coupled with the explosion of online social networks, has allowed people around the world to share their ideas and experiences with the click of a button. Beauty vloggers craft YouTube tutorials, gamers stream their performances live over Twitch, and journalists share and source news from across the world through Twitter. This web of content is always expanding—much of the information within it is true, however, plenty of it is not. How can we determine fact from fiction in this rapidly shifting information landscape? In response to these emerging concerns the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the Detecting, Combating, and Identifying […]