How does social science and government policy affect technology? That was the main question the Socio-technical Cybersecurity: It’s All About People scientific session attempted to answer at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual meeting in Washington, DC. The session was moderated by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Director Ann Drobnis, and CCC Council Member Keith Marzullo (University of Maryland, College Park) was the discussant for the panel, which included participating speakers: Brian LaMacchia (Microsoft Research) highlighted the challenges in cybersecurity in the age of cloud and edge computing in his presentation Cyberspace: Enabling Trustworthy and Autonomous Agency; David Mussington (University of Maryland, College Park) discussed the necessity of […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the first episode of the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, and episode 2 is available now. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and features interviews with researchers and policy makers about their background and experiences in the computing community. The podcast will also offer recaps of visioning workshops and other events hosted by the CCC. If you want to learn about some of the computing community’s most influential members or keep tabs on the latest areas of interest then, this is the podcast for you! The second episode of Catalyzing Computing is part 2 of the interview with CCC Council Member […]

The Computing Community Consortium is cohosting Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery on February 19-20, 2019 at the United Nations in New York City with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, University of Nottingham Rights Lab, and Arizona State University Global Security Initiative. Code 8.7 is a two-day conference that brings the computational research and artificial intelligence (AI) communities together with those working to achieve Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals. With Target 8.7, 193 countries agreed to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking by 2030, and the worst forms of child labour […]

The Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) mission is broad. Our mission is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. As a consequence, material on the CCC web site spans many areas of IT such as Intelligent Infrastructure, Privacy and Fairness, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity. Most IT professionals, however, only focus on one of these areas in order to make deep connections. Until recently, users had to know exactly what to search for in order to find material in their focus area. For this […]

The following is a blog post from ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today that considers some potential flaws in emerging software mitigations of Spectre-V1 attacks. Earlier this year, Mark Hill, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) wrote a CCC blog post on the effects of Meltdown/Spectre, which is referenced in this piece. Mark will also be part of a joint keynote at Hot Chips titled, “ Spectre/Meltdown and What It Means for Future Chip Design.”  Speculating about speculation: on the (lack of) security guarantees of Spectre-V1 mitigations   By Mark Silberstein, Oleksii Oleksenko, Christof Fetzer on Jul 2, 2018   Spectre and Meltdown opened the Pandora box of a new class of speculative execution attacks that defeat standard memory protection mechanisms. These attacks […]

The following is a guest blog post by Adam Chlipala, associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many discussions of computer security adopt metaphors from war or biology. There is an arms race between attackers finding new ways to compromise systems, defenders implementing new mitigations, attackers figuring out how to breach them, and so on. Our systems must be prepared for great varieties of different attacks, each handled with its unique antibodies, which unfortunately can only be cooked up by surviving earlier, related attacks. What’s essential is constant vigilance, and we never quite know what could go horribly wrong the next time. The game could change if […]