Preventing Poisoning Attacks on Threat Intelligence Systems

Nitika Khurana, Graduate Student, UMBC

11:00-12:00 Monday, 23 April 2018, ITE346, UMBC

As AI systems become more ubiquitous, securing them becomes an emerging challenge. Over the years, with the surge in online social media use and the data available for analysis, AI systems have been built to extract, represent and use this information. The credibility of this information extracted from open sources, however, can often be questionable. Malicious or incorrect information can cause a loss of money, reputation, and resources; and in certain situations, pose a threat to human life. In this paper, we determine the credibility of Reddit posts by estimating their reputation score to ensure the validity of information ingested by AI systems. We also maintain the provenance of the output generated to ensure information and source reliability and identify the background data that caused an attack. We demonstrate our approach in the cybersecurity domain, where security analysts utilize these systems to determine possible threats by analyzing the data scattered on social media websites, forums, blogs, etc.

Major: Psychology, Biology Minor; Biopsychology concentration (December '18)

Title of Research Project:  Impact of Internet Pornography and Gay Dating Apps on the Mental Health of Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM)

Describe your project:  This research is less of a research project conducted in a lab and more of an extensive literature review that's looking to examine how exactly use of pornography and dating apps impact rates of mental health in gay and bisexual college students. Various articles focusing on LGBT student health, on the connection between sexual activity in LGBT populations and mental health, how factors of race and drug use play a role in mental health rates, and overall perceptions by the general public of LGBT populations will be reviewed as I go through my research. 

Who is your mentor(s) for your project? Dr. Shuyan Sun, UMBC Department of Psychology. I found my mentor through an advertisement posted outside of her office door in the psychology department of obtaining quantitative research experience while I was looking for research experience for my major. I initially was intrigued by Dr. Sun's focus on utilizing SPSS in data collection and analysis, and the exposure to more quantitative based analysis that her lab would provide, as I was a stats minor at the time when I joined her lab in Fall 2017. She also advertised that she required all of her students to present at URCAD, and you had to be at the very least interested in presenting at URCAD in order to join her lab. 

How did you become interested in this project? After speaking more with Dr. Sun about what was required to be in her lab, I found that I could choose any research topic that I was interested in and conduct research on it, as long as it involved secondary data analysis, which basically means that I would be looking at research articles with data in them and interpreting their results and presenting them. I was inspired to conduct research on this particular topic for I wanted to investigate issues pertaining to this population, understand from a more objective viewpoint some of the negative perceptions that I held and better understand issues that I faced while exploring my sexual identity. 

What has been the hardest part about your research/what was the most unexpected thing about being a researcher? The hardest part has been the time that this has taken for me to get through this, as well as actually committing to finishing the research. My data is essentially (and will be) almost 100 pages worth of text that I have to go through, sort into variables, pull quantitative data from based on trends presented in the data, and see how they match with my hypothesis. I didn't realize how extensive this would be, as well as how much I really didn't know about conducting independent research. I didn't realize how much I would learn about myself and about the topic that I was researching while going through this. 

What has been the most rewarding part? A better understanding of myself as a researcher, as well as my identity. Despite all the gloom about LGBT mental health that I found in my research that seemed to reinforce the already negative perceptions about my own sexual identity, I found that there was a lot of research going into this population to better understand these issues and create integrative solutions to solve problems with LGBT mental health, addressing increased rates of HIV, and creating a more supportive online atmosphere for LGBT individuals. 

How will you disseminate your research? A poster presentation at URCAD- this Wednesday, 10-11:30am in the UC Ballroom. 

What is your advice to other students involved in research? This may sound cliche, but for the love that all that is holy, don't procrastinate on getting your research done, especially if you are presenting at URCAD. You will find yourself rushing to get your research done, and may not have the most integrative experience in your research. Conducting research is a commitment that can be an amazing experience, though it can become a huge burden if you allow it to to slip out from underneath of you. Find a topic that you find incredibly interesting, and develop a strong working relationship with your research adviser. Not only will it make your research that much more engaging, but it will also make the process of getting your research completed and presented that much more seamless. 

What are your career goals? After graduation, I'll be heading into the workforce, though I'm most likely going into the Navy and becoming an officer. My eventual career goals would be to go to grad school to obtain a Ph.D. in psychology and either go into clinical work or conduct research.  

SFS cyberdefense scholarship applications due April 27

The next application deadline for SFS cyberdefense scholarships to UMBC is 12noon Friday April 27, 2018, for possible scholarships beginning fall 2018. See www.cisa.umbc.edu for details and application forms.

These major scholarships include tuition, generous stipend, and more, in return for government employment. Applicants must have at least junior status in fall 2018. BS, MS, MPS, PhD in any cyber-related field may apply (CS, CE, EE, IS, Cyber). SFS applicants must be citizens or lawful permanent residents capable of obtaining a secret clearance at federal, state, local, or tribal government. The annual stipends are $22,500 undergraduate and $34,000 graduate.

These scholarships are highly competitive (e.g., the median GPA of current SFS scholars at UMBC is 3.8) and favor students who have excelled in upper-level technical courses and who have demonstrated a passion and talent for cybersecurity through relevant accomplishments. We will consider applications from rising juniors and above with GPA over 3.0. All SFS scholars at UMBC are expected to engage in cohort and research activities. For more information, see the SFS FAQ page.

Interested students should contact

Dr. Alan T. Sherman
Professor of Computer Science
Director, UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA)
*protected email*

The post SFS cyberdefense scholarship applications due April 27 appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

UMBC at SemEval-2018 Task 8: Understanding Text about Malware

We describe the systems developed by the UMBC team for 2018 SemEval Task 8, SecureNLP (Semantic Extraction from CybersecUrity REports using Natural Language Processing). We participated in three of the sub-tasks: (1) classifying sentences as being relevant or irrelevant to malware, (2) predicting token labels for sentences, and (4) predicting attribute labels from the Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization vocabulary for defining malware characteristics. We achieved F1 scores of 50.34/18.0 (dev/test), 22.23 (test-data), and 31.98 (test-data) for Task1, Task2 and Task2 respectively. We also make our cybersecurity embeddings publicly available at https://bit.ly/cybr2vec.

Hello everyone! Looking for a female/male roommate to find a place with, or someone with a room, I can move in as early as the summer and would like a long term leas at least one year. My budget is around 500$ including everything, I know a couple of good options. I am a clean  easy going person who enjoy the company of other but still need my own space. My only restriction is the place need to be on a school bus route.

if you are interested please email me at: tc97295@umbc.edu

I may be wrong, but aren’t busses supposed to stop at every stop there’s a potential rider? Annoyingly, that can't be said about the UMBC bus transit system.

There were about a couple dozen UMBC students at the bus stop nearest Camden Yards, the Pratt & Howard stop, waiting to be picked up by the UMBC transit bus by the 10:15 pm bus. The bus came as expected, and completely didn’t stop at the stop with no intention of stopping either. The bus zoomed by 2 lanes over from the stop without even slowing down. The bus wasn't even in the correct lane to pick us up. And, it’s not as if you could miss us considering there were a couple dozen of us mainly dressed in O's & UMBC gear for UMBC Pride Night at the O's game tonight.

So frustrating following the bus on the rider app and watching it just zoom by without any intention of stopping. And this is about the third time this has happened to me in about 10 round trips on the downtown bus line at that Pratt & Howard stop. And, since this frequently happens to me, I imagine it frequently happens to other people as well on at least the downtown route.

There are other options, but they require waiting like 45 minutes for the next UMBC bus to hopefully pick you up or, if you have the foreknowledge and money, taking a slow and $2 route 76 city bus or taking really expensive Uber, if you can. Don't ask me how everyone got back to UMBC.

Also, what if the last bus of the day didn't stop to pick someone up and he or she didn't plan ahead or have the money or have the cell phone battery to get back to UMBC some other way because they were relying on the UMBC bus to bring them home? They'd be stranded in the middle of the night in downtown Baltimore with almost no knowledge/ability to get back to UMBC. I imagine that's happened before.

Moral of the event: If you plan to take a UMBC bus back to UMBC, you better have backups to get back because there is a good chance the bus won't pick you up even if you're at the bus stop.

UMBC expects over 350 presenters and 2,500 guests to attend Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day on April 25, making URCAD 2018 the largest in the event’s 22-year history. The annual showcase of advanced undergraduate work offers students a chance to share with the broader community projects they have been working on for months, or even years. Through URCAD, students practice their presentation skills, get robust feedback on their work, and engage with fellow researchers to think, collaborate, and push their research in new directions.

“I am most proud of the kinds of questions these students are asking in their research and creative work,” says April Householder, director of undergraduate research and prestigious scholarships. “From developing clean air technologies or bringing awareness to human trafficking, to collaborating with local poets and creating meaningful art, UMBC undergrads are making change in the world.”

Undergraduate Research Award (URA) recipient Courtney Mattson ‘18, biological sciences, works with Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences, to examine the mating behaviors of male darters, a common freshwater fish. Mattson spent hours catching darters in a Pennsylvania stream and running controlled trials in the lab, on top of her regular coursework and dedication to cross-country and track and field.

With all of these commitments, Mattson says that completing research required her to hone her time-management skills. “Because my experiment had to be conducted during mating season, I was sometimes trying to find an extra 10 hours per week to run trials on top of a full-time course load and outdoor track competition season,” she says.

Still, Mattson found it exhilarating, and she recommends all students dive into a variety of experiences. “Never put yourself into a box,” she says. “Don’t limit yourself by thinking, ‘I’m an athlete, so I don’t have time for research,’ or ‘I’m not a STEM major, so I can’t do research.’ Through my research, I’ve learned so much about ecology and evolution, but I have also made friendships, gotten to know a faculty member, and had fun along the way.”

Maia Schechter ‘18, dance, will present Now Elsewhere, a performance of three acts featuring six dancers that she choreographed to explore the profound loss of loved ones. Schechter shares, “I believe the movement and music work together to create a poignant journey that the audience can relate to.”

URCAD will be the third presentation of Now Elsewhere, which will also be performed in June at the Kennedy Center as an official selection of the National College Dance Festival. Festival adjudicators shared, “We chose Now Elsewhere with deep appreciation of its unusual compositional structure, and its taut, compelling performance. The work demands that its performers work with physical accuracy and synchronicity as well as emotional transparency in its abstract rendering of a community reforming itself.”

Jamshaid Shahir ’18, mathematics and statistics, will present his research on mathematically modeling cell polarization—a process through which cells develop distinct front and back ends, allowing them to move and transmit information. His research with mentor Hye-Won Kang, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, is supported by NIH and NSF. Both a Meyerhoff Scholar and MARC U*STAR, Shahir has already received a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in computational biology at UNC Chapel Hill.

Reflecting on his research experiences at UMBC, Shahir shares, “The mentorship and guidance I have received…has been invaluable in clarifying my resolve to earn a Ph.D. and has opened many doors for me in terms of research opportunities.” This includes “presenting at conferences around the country, from Harvard to Hawaii.”

Priyanka Ranade ‘18, information systems, another URA recipient, will present her work on using advanced computing techniques to more accurately identify cyber threats—part of UMBC’s research collaboration with IBM. Ranade works with Anupam Joshi, chair and professor of computer science and electrical engineering. She has been focusing on a specific aspect of cybersecurity called multilingual representation, which relies on natural language processing to understand cyber threats in a range of natural languages.

“The URA allowed me to explore a whole new area I was not familiar with, which was the intersection of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity,” she says. Her advice to new student researchers: Ask your mentor questions instead of Googling everything. Ranade explains, “Human insight from experience cannot always be communicated through a search engine. Being open about what you don’t understand…it’s a part of being a researcher.”

Kelly Dunn ‘18, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication (MLLI), has examined constructions of collective and personal memory of armed conflict in Colombia, under the mentorship of Tania Lizarazo, assistant professor of MLLI. Dunn explored how participants in the Mujeres Pacificas storytelling project spoke about their personal experiences with violence in the context of other life experiences, involving gender and economic disparities, in a way that differed from how memory of the conflict was presented at the national level.

As part of his research, Dunn traveled to Colombia, living with a host family. There he developed a clearer sense of the diversity within Colombian culture and the experiences of Colombian people living in different communities. “I would encourage students to jump in and get engaged in the research process as soon as possible,” he says, “especially when you are talking about doing research in a language that is not your own.”

“You also have a lot less time than you think you have,” Dunn notes. “I have been speaking Spanish for about 8 or 9 years and am comfortable with it, and even then…it took a while to get my ear to adjust to the specific dialect.”

Linda Wiratan ’19, biochemistry and molecular biology, and URA recipient and 2018 Goldwater Scholar, conducts research on the relationship between plant defense systems and their circadian clocks with Hua Lu, associate professor of biological sciences. “Plants have evolved extremely sophisticated mechanisms of disease immunity,” Wiratan says. “They are even capable of anticipating attacks by specific pathogens at certain times of day, and coordinate defense activities with their circadian clock.”

Wiratan has embraced the role of researcher at UMBC. Through her work, she says, “I gained a deep appreciation of how plants, despite being immobile, survive amid constant threats.” She describes research as a “thrilling” experience of discovery, explaining, “The researcher is the first one who learns a little more about the universe, and that role is invaluable.”

URA recipient Ezra Pailer, visual arts, will present an animated documentary created in collaboration with local poet Jordann Allen, under the mentorship of Corrie Parks, assistant professor of visual arts. The project combines hand-drawn animation and live-action film to reveal an intimate view of the artist’s imagination and personal inner narrative as expressed both visually and in spoken words.

Pailer shares, “The audio of Allen reading her poetry has a serene and fluid quality; this presented an interesting challenge in designing animated sequences that complement the flowing nature of a medium like poetry.” Allen will join Pailer at the presentation of his film.

Lucas McCullum ‘18, mechanical engineering, explores how piezoelectric materials, which create electricity in response to mechanical stress, can be used for different purposes, including to detect tumors. He has found research to be an incredibly valuable experience and suggests it can “help a younger student to discover their passions while learning about how to successfully manage their time and critically analyze complex problems.”

McCullum, a URA scholar who works with Soobum Lee, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, particularly appreciates his research experience for teaching him how to embrace new situations where he doesn’t immediately have all the answers. “One of the most certain things in research is that you never know what is going to happen the next time you go into the lab, and the ability to be flexible and adapt to unpredictable situations is one of the most valuable experiences out there,” he says.

Yuwanyun Zhu ‘18, SAHAP and psychology, has studied parental control among European American and Asian American parents, specifically Chinese and Korean immigrant mothers in the U.S., under the mentorship of Charissa Cheah, professor of psychology. Zhu has interviewed numerous mothers in English, Mandarin, and Korean languages over the past two years, with the goal of deconstructing cross-cultural stereotypes about parenting styles and their effects on children’s behavior and development.

This project has solidified her feeling that research “is a very powerful way to help people change their beliefs and remove stereotypes,” which can in turn help people “become more understanding” of each other.

Through all this work, Householder says, it’s evident that URCAD “upholds UMBC’s mission as a public research university to integrate teaching, research, and service in dynamic and engaged ways.”

Whether a student goes on to graduate school or directly into a career, major projects completed in their undergraduate years can drive lifelong passions, support critical thinking, and boost an array of skills crucial to their future success. This includes everything from how to identify a problem and explain its importance to how to set project goals, see a project through to completion, accept feedback constructively, and connect with stakeholders who are impacted by the work.

Householder invites all of UMBC to support URCAD presenters by attending the event on April 25 and “asking good questions” that challenge students to think about their work in new ways. “There is something for everyone at URCAD,” she says, sharing, “I hope it inspires even more people in our community to conduct research, collaborate, mentor, and bring creativity to their work each day.”

Featured image: November 2017 performance of Now Elsewhere. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.