This past weekend, Dr. Rick Forno, CYBR GPD and Assistant Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, joined Dr. Matt Blaze (UPenn), Dr. Jeff Foster (UMCP), and COL (Ph.D) Greg Conti (USMA) on the closing plenary panel for Schmoocon 2016 in Washington, DC.

ShmooCon is an annual east coast hacker convention offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions of critical infosec issues.  The first day is a single track of speed talks called One Track Mind.  The next two days bring three tracks:  Build It, Belay It, and Bring It On.

The panel examined the current state of information security programs in academia. Along the way they discussed issues around dealing with administration and the peculiarities of information security, the current state of information security research, attracting and vetting students/faculty, and generally what it’s like to be growing the next generation of information security professionals in a time where academia frequently is placed in the position of “building the bus while going down the road.”

This past weekend, Dr. Rick Forno, CYBR GPD and Assistant Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, joined Dr. Matt Blaze (UPenn), Dr. Jeff Foster (UMCP), and COL (Ph.D) Greg Conti (USMA) on the closing plenary panel for Schmoocon 2016 in Washington, DC.

ShmooCon is an annual east coast hacker convention offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions of critical infosec issues.  The first day is a single track of speed talks called One Track Mind.  The next two days bring three tracks:  Build It, Belay It, and Bring It On.

The panel examined the current state of information security programs in academia. Along the way they discussed issues around dealing with administration and the peculiarities of information security, the current state of information security research, attracting and vetting students/faculty, and generally what it’s like to be growing the next generation of information security professionals in a time where academia frequently is placed in the position of “building the bus while going down the road.”

Cyber Defense Lab
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

cMix: Anonymization by High-Performance Scalable Mixing

Farid Javani
Cyber Defense Lab, CSEE Dept., UMBC

11:15am-12:30pm Friday, 29 January 2016, ITE 231

cMix is a cryptographic protocol for mix networks that uses pre-computations of a group-homomorphic encryption function to avoid all real-time public-key operations by the senders, mix nodes, and receivers. Like other mix network protocols, cMix can enable an anonymity service that accepts inputs from senders and delivers them to an output buffer, in a way that the outputs are unlinkable to the inputs. cMix’s high-performance scalable architecture, which results from its unique pre-computation approach, makes it suitable for smartphone-to-smartphone use while maintaining full anonymity sets independently per round.

Each sender establishes a shared key separately with each of the mix nodes, which is used as a seed to a cryptographic pseudorandom number generator to generate a sequence of message keys. Each sender encrypts its input to cMix with modular multiplication by message keys. cMix works by replacing the message keys, which are not known in the pre-computation, in real time with a precomputed random value.

Our presentation includes a detailed specification of cMix and simulation-based security arguments. We also give performance analysis, both modeled and measured, of our working prototype currently running in the cloud.

cMix is the core technology underlying our larger PrivaTegrity system that allows smart devices to carry out a variety of applications anonymously (including sending and receiving chat messages), with little extra bandwidth or battery usage. This talk focuses on cMix.

Joint work with David Chaum (Voting Systems Institute), Aniket Kate (Purdue Univ.), Anna Krasnova (Radboud Univ.), Joeri de Ruiter (Univ. of Birmingham), Alan T. Sherman (UMBC).  See and recent articles in Wired and Fortune for discussion.

Favid Javani is a PhD student working with Dr. Sherman. He earned a MS from the Middle Eastern Technical University, Turkey, with a thesis on lattice-based cryptography.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

Cyber Defense Lab
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

cMix: Anonymization by High-Performance Scalable Mixing

Farid Javani
Cyber Defense Lab, CSEE Dept., UMBC

11:15am-12:30pm Friday, 29 January 2016, ITE 231

cMix is a cryptographic protocol for mix networks that uses pre-computations of a group-homomorphic encryption function to avoid all real-time public-key operations by the senders, mix nodes, and receivers. Like other mix network protocols, cMix can enable an anonymity service that accepts inputs from senders and delivers them to an output buffer, in a way that the outputs are unlinkable to the inputs. cMix’s high-performance scalable architecture, which results from its unique pre-computation approach, makes it suitable for smartphone-to-smartphone use while maintaining full anonymity sets independently per round.

Each sender establishes a shared key separately with each of the mix nodes, which is used as a seed to a cryptographic pseudorandom number generator to generate a sequence of message keys. Each sender encrypts its input to cMix with modular multiplication by message keys. cMix works by replacing the message keys, which are not known in the pre-computation, in real time with a precomputed random value.

Our presentation includes a detailed specification of cMix and simulation-based security arguments. We also give performance analysis, both modeled and measured, of our working prototype currently running in the cloud.

cMix is the core technology underlying our larger PrivaTegrity system that allows smart devices to carry out a variety of applications anonymously (including sending and receiving chat messages), with little extra bandwidth or battery usage. This talk focuses on cMix.

Joint work with David Chaum (Voting Systems Institute), Aniket Kate (Purdue Univ.), Anna Krasnova (Radboud Univ.), Joeri de Ruiter (Univ. of Birmingham), Alan T. Sherman (UMBC).  See and recent articles in Wired and Fortune for discussion.

Favid Javani is a PhD student working with Dr. Sherman. He earned a MS from the Middle Eastern Technical University, Turkey, with a thesis on lattice-based cryptography.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

The Preservation Archaeology Field School in southwestern New Mexico will offer students an opportunity to learn excavation, survey, and analysis methods in a beautiful, remote, and archaeologically rich part of the American Southwest. The program will integrate research, education and preservation to investigate compelling questions about the past. 

This six-week program will provide undergraduate students an opportunity to test excavations at the Gila River Farm site in New Mexico. The program will primarily focus on how different earlier traditions have allowed people of various cultural background to live together, which includes questions such as how local plants and animals are used and how raw materials are obtained. 

PROGRAM DATE- MAY 25 2016 - JULY 5 2016

APPLICATION DEADLINE- MARCH 18 2016

Learn about where you will camp and what you should bring here.

Check out what students have to say about the program here.