17th Central Area Networking and Security Workshop


CANSec 2024

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Saturday, October 12th

Register here!


We are pleased to invite you to the 17th Central Area Networking and Security Workshop (CANSec 2024) on October 12, 2024. The CANSec workshop aims to provide a regular forum for presenting research and education activities in all areas related to computer security and networking, as well as promoting interactions and collaborations among scholars and students and between academia and industry.

Key Dates

Agenda

Newcomers Faculty Panel

Moderator: 

Panelists:

Keynote Speaker


Call for Participation

We seek submissions presenting original research and education activities on all practical and theoretical aspects of computer and communications security.  Original research contributions that were previously accepted/presented, i.e., work-already-published (WaP) papers, are also acceptable. The participants can deliver an oral presentation or a poster presentation.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


Abstract Submission

CANSec'24 requires a short abstract (no more than 250 words) for both oral and poster presentations.

Submission link combined with registration is available here.


CANSec'24 Registration

To register for the CANSec workshop, click here. The registration fee is $30. We will collect the registration fee at the door. If you do not register online by October 7th, you may also register at the door on October 12th for a $50 fee. 


Student Travel Grants

The Central Area Networking and Security (CANSec) Workshop encourages students to participate in the workshop by providing a travel grant. This NSF-sponsored travel award aims to partially subsidize the travel costs. Note that the travel award is pending budget approval and will be reimbursement based. The following expenses may be covered by the travel grant: (1) workshop registration, (2) hotel rooms, students are encouraged to share rooms, and (3) transportation, students are encouraged to share ride. 


The selection process will give preference to (1) students of underrepresented minority groups; (2) presenters of accepted abstracts; and (3) attendees of the cyber defense competition.


To apply for student travel grant, students should provide: 


Applications for a student travel grant should be emailed as a PDF to bluo@ku.edu by October 8th. Notifications will be made on October 10th.

Capture-the-Flag (CTF) Competition

 The second CANSec CTF Competition is organized by the University of Oklahoma. More details are available here.

General Timeline for CTF

Registration Opens: https://ctf.sooners.us/register

CTF Platform Demo Video Released: here

CTF Competition Begins at 12:00 PM

CTF Competition Ends at 12:00 PM

Awards Ceremony at 3:00 PM

Keynote Speaker

Security Of AI, By AI and For AI: Charting New Territories in AI-Centered Cybersecurity Research

Abstract: The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the unyielding demand for their transformative applications have ushered in significant opportunities for security and privacy research and innovations. There is an urgent need for innovative and practical solutions to protect data and other assets to support the training and utilization of large, complicated machine learning (ML) models in a scalable and cost-effective manner ("Security For AI"). In the meantime, substantial research efforts are focused on understanding the security and privacy implications of AI systems, particularly identification of vulnerabilities in ML models and mitigation of associated risks ("Security Of AI"). Furthermore, cutting-edge AI technologies are increasingly being deployed to enhance the security of computing systems, offering intelligent protection and more effective defenses against real-world threats ("Security By AI").

In this presentation, I will use our research in these areas to demonstrate how AI innovations have expanded the horizons of security and privacy research. For instance, under the theme "Security For AI," I will provide an overview of ongoing research at the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC) — one of the largest initiatives funded by the US National Science Foundation aimed at advancing practical, scalable data-in-use protection. This initiative is poised to have a transformative impact on AI research. Regarding "Security Of AI," I will discuss our investigations into Trojan threats to ML models, exploring the fundamentality of this emerging security risk, its defensibility in particular. In the context of "Security By AI," I will showcase how AI and ML technologies are revolutionizing the detection and prediction of security threats within carrier networks—a vital infrastructure—by automating the analysis of their documentations. Lastly, I will discuss potential future directions in the vast space of AI-centered cybersecurity research and innovations.

Speaker Biography: Dr. XiaoFeng Wang is the Associate Dean for Research and a James H. Rudy Professor of Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, Indiana University at Bloomington and a Fellow of ACM, IEEE and AAAS. At IU, he is also a Co-Director of Center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing and Engineering, and was the Director of the Master of Science in Secure Computing (MSSC) program.

Dr. Wang serves as Director and Lead PI of Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC), a Frontiers Project in Secure and Trustworthy Computing funded by the National Science Foundation. The project is a multi-institution effort, involving faculty from IU (Lead), CMU, Duke, OSU, Penn State, Purdue, Spelman and Yale. The center aims at laying the technological foundations for practical data-in-use protection based on Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) over today and tomorrow’s cloud and edge platforms, which is critical to the advance of AI and data science.

Dr. Wang is the Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC), and was also TPC Co-Chair of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the ACM’s flagship security and privacy conference, during 2018 and 2019. In the past 20 years, Dr. Wang has been working on a broad range of research topics in systems security and data privacy. He is considered to be one of the most prominent systems security and privacy researchers, a top author according to online statistics such as CSRankings, System Security Circus (Eurecom), and Top Authors, the Systems Cirus (EPFL). Dr. Wang is known for his high-impact research on security analysis of real-world systems and biomedical data privacy. Particularly, the projects he led on side-channel analysis and mitigation, payment and single-sign-on API integrations, Android and iOS security and IoT protection have changed the way the industry built computing systems. Also he is a pioneer researcher on human genome privacy and a co-founder of the iDASH Genome Privacy Competition that contributes to reducing the gap between security and cryptography research and real-world demands for biomedical data sharing and computing protection. More recently, he is actively working on TEE-based Data-in-Use protection for supporting AI, Trustworthy AI, and application of AI technologies (such as NLP and deep learning) to protect computing systems, LTE/5G networks in particular.

For his work, Dr. Wang has received numerous awards, including Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (the PET Award), Best Practical Paper Award at the 32nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P Oakland), and two Distinguished Paper Awards at the 26th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). His work has been extensively reported by public media, including CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Forbes, Slashdot, Nature News, etc.

Technical Sessions

Each presentation should be a 15-minute talk and a 5-minute Q&A session.

Session #1 (11:10 AM - 12:10 PM)

Session Chair: Fengjun Li (University of Kansas)

The Invisible Polyjuice Potion: An Effective Physical Adversarial Attack Against Face Recognition

[Ye Wang  -  University of Kansas]

Dynamic Data Driven Security Framework for Industrial Control Networks Using Programmable Switches

[Reuben Samson Raj  -  University of Arkansas]

Software Based Side Channel Attacks in SDNs

[Muhammad Tehmasib Ali Tashfeen  -  Wichita State University]


Session #2 (03:30 - 04:50 PM)

Session Chair: Chao Lan (University of Oklahoma)

Sinema: Semantics-driven Intelligent Network Management Using AI assistance

[Ava Sharif Jourabchi  -  University of Missouri - Kansas City]

Robust Privacy-Preserving Classification for Lensless Images

[Sumit Bhattarai  -  University of Kansas]

Eunomia: A Real-time Privacy Compliance Firewall for Alexa Skills

[Javaria Ahmad  -  University of Central Missouri]

Parrot-Trained Adversarial Examples: Pushing the Practicality of Black-Box Audio Attacks Against Speaker Recognition Models

[Rui Duan  -  University of Missouri - Kansas City]

Poster Session (during lunch break 12:10 - 1:50 pm)

[Ankitha Srirama Reddy, Jayadithya Nalajala, Ava Sharif Jourabchi, Thanveer Sulthana, Baek-Young Choi  -  UMKC]


[Xinyu Cao - OU, Shangqing Zhao - OU, Yanjun Pan - U of A, Yuchen Liu - NCSU]


[Yanjun Pan - U of A, Shangqing Zhao - OU, Yuchen Liu - NCSU]

Venue

The 17th CANSec workshop will be held at Oklahoma Memorial Union (Regents & Associates) at the University of Oklahoma.


Parking 

Attendees can park in the Page Street parking lot, which is the nearest parking location. OU parking permits are not required on weekends, as OU Parking Services does not issue tickets during this time. The full OU parking map is available here.


Hotel Offers

Noun Hotel (less than 1 mile from the workshop venue)

*Note: The special conference hotel room rate is $159 plus tax, and you need to use the above link. The deadline to make a hotel reservation at this room rate is September 27, so please make your reservation as soon as possible. 

There are multiple hotels around OU. Here are some other hotel choices (within 5 miles from the workshop venue; no special rate):

NCED Conference Center & Hotel 

Hilton Garden Inn Norman

Embassy Suites by Hilton Norman Hotel & Conference Center

Organizing Committee

For any questions, please contact the chairs: 

{songf, am}@ou.edu

Steering Committee

About the CANSec Workshop

The Central Area Networking and Security Workshop (CANSec), which was formerly known as the Greater Kansas Area Security Workshop (KanSec), aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in networking and security-related fields in the central area of the US.

Since spring of 2012, the workshop has attracted attendees from Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc. We have also invited speakers from Texas, Indiana, Colorado, South Carolina, Virginia, etc. The goal of the CANSec workshop is to provide a forum to present research in all areas related to computer networking and security, as well as to promote interactions and collaborations between academia and industry. The workshop was originally organized semi-annually in 2012-2016. Since 2016, the CANSec community decides to change it to an annual event to encourage high-quality work to be presented and demonstrated in the workshop.

Starting from 2014, the CANSec workshop added a Cyber-Defense Competition component to its Fall events. The goal of the competition is to provide students with a platform to apply theoretical knowledge into practice, and to obtain hands-on cyber security experiences. It is a one-day competition, in which student teams will be asked to oversee a small corporate network, to manage all critical services, and to defend against external attacks. Scoring will be primarily based on the availability of the services, and how the attacks and injects are handled.

Sponsors