Speakers

Susan Landau, Tufts University

Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University and Visiting Professor of Computer Science, University College London. Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. Landau has been a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Wesleyan University. She is a member of the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. Her new book, “Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age,” was published by Yale University Press.

Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age

What makes us most secure? Is it enabling the police and intelligence agencies to unlock digital devices and listen to communications? Or is it securely protecting devices and communications against intrusions? Two events in 2016 painted this issue in sharp contrast. In February 2016, the FBI tried to compel Apple to open the locked iPhone of a San Bernardino terrorist. Apple refused, citing threats to iPhone security. Eventually the phone was unlocked without Apple’s help; the battle over encryption continued. Then, in October 2016, the US government announced that Russia had interfered with the 2016 presidential campaign, attacking not only the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, but also research institutions and civil society organizations. Nor was the US the only target of Russian government attacks; the 2016 French presidential election was similarly targeted.  What makes us most secure? In this talk, I will discuss our most serious threats and what’s needed to protect against them.

 

Celeste Matarazzo, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

Cyber Security Research: A Data Scientist’s Perspective

As all aspects of our lives become increasingly dependent on computing networks and the Internet, cyber security has grown from a localized economic problem to a major national imperative. Situational awareness of computer networks presents many challenges including but not limited to the volume of the data and the dynamic and evolving nature of the problem space. For example, at the perimeter of a corporate enterprise computer network, it is common to see terabytes of network traffic each day, containing millions of unique IP addresses and connection records that number in the hundreds of millions. Celeste will provide an overview and discuss recent trends facing computer security researchers and practitioners. She will describe recent work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to enable analysis of computer networks. Characterizing network-wide activity depends critically on understanding time-varying patterns of system behaviors, such as the actions and connections between components.  This approach makes use of state of the art data collection, building and accessing large-scale graph representations, and new capabilities and advances in data science and machine learning.

Once WiCyS accommodates all student scholarship and faculty accommodation award recipients, program presenters, sponsoring partners’ delegates, ALL other registrations (except students) will open on January 15 and close on February 15, 2018 OR at capacity (whichever comes first).