Need some inspiration this Monday? Coming right up!

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

What about some humor? We’ve got that too!

Registration for the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference (MDC3) is now open. MDC3 will provide an opportunity for students and professionals to network in a fun environment while participating in exciting games and learning about computer safety and cybersecurity skills.

MDC3 teams up to six players who will compete in one of three categories: high school, college and university, and industry professionals. High school teams will focus on cyber defense techniques whereas college, university and professional teams will compete in a capture the flag match.

Students must be enrolled at a Maryland high school, college, or university. Professionals’ employers must have an office in Maryland and must be either a company or government agency. Teams can register during a day of an orientation session or online if they are unable to attend in person. The next orientation session will held between 4:30pm and 7:00pm on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 at the UMBC Technology Center, 1450 South Rolling Road. People interested in the professional league should come between 4:30-5:30pm and students should come between 6:00pm and 7:00pm.

The sessions will give contestants and coaches insight about the event as well as tips and tricks to prepare for the competition. After registering and orientation, competitors will be able to attend practice challenges during the summer to prepare for the qualifying rounds in September and finals on October 21-22 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Scholarships and prizes will be available for winning participants.

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

¹ Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,

² To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours:

³ Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

⁴ I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. ⁵ For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— ⁶ God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. ⁷ Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. ⁸ He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Reflection:

We see how Paul viewed the Corinthians and the hope he had for them.  In many ways, the way Paul describes and hopes for the Corinthians didn’t seem to match the fact that he had to address so many issues throughout the Corinthian letters.  This shows that Paul’s vision, hope, faith didn’t depend upon the Corinthians, but upon the calling that he had received from God.

Response:

Perhaps because of what’s happening or not happening, we can get side tracked and lose sight.  But just as Paul held on to his calling, let’s also hold on to the calling God has given us. Let’s pray that we will remember each day the calling we have received and that this calling daily defines our vision, hope and faith as we live.

As part of her Independent Studies in the New Media Studio, Fulbright Scholar Meri Collazos Sola developed a multimedia project using digital digital storytelling to explore identity and culture shock. The project website, www.cultureshockstory.com is based on Meri's research in the Intercultural Communications program.

"This project contains the materials I will focus on for my scholarly paper. The scholarly paper should be related to some of the topics that we've done for the core courses. The main topics of the research will be intercultural competency, creativity and two up and coming new media formats: digital storytelling and personal documentary film."

Back in May, it was reported that a robot explorer sent through the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered mysterious hieroglyphs in the 4,500-year-old mausoleum behind one of its mysterious doors. The images transmitted by the robot showed hieroglyphs written in red paint that had not been seen by human eyes since the construction of the pyramid.

This week, the reports are that the three red ochre figures painted on the floor of a hidden chamber at the end of a tunnel deep inside the pyramid are just numbers. The builders of the pyramid simply recorded the total length of the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber: 121 cubits.

While not exactly graffiti, it reminds me that when I’ve worked on an older house, I’ve often found notes left by the original workers who built it, like sketches with dimensions on the plaster covered up by wallpaper.

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

A Security Framework to Cope With
Node Misbehaviors in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Wenjia Li

11:00am Tuesday, 14 June 2011, ITE 325b

A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) has no fixed infrastructure, and is generally composed of a dynamic set of cooperative peers. These peers share their wireless transmission power with other peers so that indirect communication can be possible between nodes that are not in the radio range of each other . The nature of MANETs, such as node mobility, unreliable transmission medium and restricted battery power, makes them extremely vulnerable to a variety of node misbehaviors. Wireless links, for instance, are generally prone to both passive eavesdropping and active intrusion. Another security concern in ad hoc networks is caused by the cooperative nature of the nodes. Attacks from external adversaries may disturb communications, but the external intruder generally cannot directly participate in the cooperative activities among the nodes because they do not possess the proper secure credentials, such as shared keys. However, compromised nodes, which are taken over by an adversary, are capable of presenting the proper secure credentials, and consequently can interfere with almost all of the network operations, including route discovery, key management and distribution, and packet forwarding. Hence, it is essential to cope with node misbehaviors so as to secure mobile ad hoc networks.

In this dissertation, we address the question of how to ensure that a MANET will properly operate despite the presence of various node misbehaviors by building a holistic framework that can cope with various node misbehaviors in an intelligent and adaptive manner. The main purpose of this framework is to provide a platform so that the components that identify and respond to misbehaviors can better cooperate with each other and quickly adapt to the changes of network context. Therefore, policies are utilized in our framework in order to make those components correctly function in different network contexts. Besides the policy component, there are three other components, which fulfill the tasks of misbehavior detection, trust management, and context awareness, respectively. To validate and evaluate our proposed framework, we implement our framework based on a simulator.

The specific contributions of this dissertation are: (i) Develop a framework to combine the functionalities of surveillance and detection of misbehavior, trust management, context awareness, and policy management to provide a high-level solution to cope with various misbehaviors in MANETs in an intelligent and adaptive manner; (ii) Utilize the outlier detection technique as well as the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm to detect node misbehaviors, and both techniques do not require a pre-defined fix threshold for misbehavior detection; (iii) Trust is modeled in a vector instead of a single scalar so that it can reflect the trustworthiness of a node in a more accurate manner; (iv) Sense and record various contextual information, such as network status (channel busy/idle, etc.), node status (transmission buffer full/empty, battery full/low, etc.) and environmental factors (altitude, velocity, temperature, weather condition, etc.), so that we can distinguish truly malicious behaviors from faulty behaviors and also more accurately evaluate nodes' trust; (v) Specify and enforce policies in the proposed framework, which makes the framework promptly adapt to the rapidly changing network context.

Committee:

• Dr. Anupam Joshi (Chair)
• Dr. Tim Finin
• Dr. Yelena Yesha
• Dr. Yun Peng
• Dr. Lalana Kagal (MIT CSAIL)