Part of the ACSOS Workshops series held in conjunction with
Mon 27 September - Fri 1, Virtual Event
Time is EDT
8:00 – 8:45 Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Keynote, Challenges in the Design of Secure and Resilient Autonomous Systems
8:45 – 9:45 Dr. Sudip Mittal, Keynote, Data and AI’s impact on cyber operations
9:45 – 10:15 Nils Scheidweiler, André Schäfer, Wolfram Amme and Thomas Heinze, "Using Clone Detection for Finding Signatures of Malware Families: A Case Study on FinSpy"
10:15 – 10:45 Qinyuan Li, Minyi Li, Bao Quoc Vo and Ryszard Kowalczyk, "An anytime algorithm for dynamic multi-agent task allocation problems"
10:45 – 11:00 Break?
11:00 – 11:30 Simon Pulawski, Hoa Khanh Dam and Aditya Ghose, "BDI-Dojo: developing robust BDI agents in evolving adversarial environments"
11:30 – 12:00 Partha Pal, Aaron Paulos and Richard Schantz, "Resiliency and Antifragility in Modern Software Systems -- A Concept Paper"
When: Sept. 27, 8:00 am EDT
Who: Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, University of Newcastle
Abstract -
In this talk, I will outline some thoughts on the challenges involved in the design of secure and resilient autonomous systems. We will start with a brief discussion on the nature and characteristics of autonomous systems. Then we will consider the security capabilities of agents required in autonomous systems. Then the focus of the talk will switch considering some of the research challenges involved in the design of secure autonomous systems. We will outline a set of core modules such as robust and adaptive distributed learning, secure system analysis and cognitive models for human-agent teaming, and discuss how they can be orchestrated to achieve the security goals.
Bio -
Vijay Varadharajan is the Global Innovation Chair in Cyber Security at the University of Newcastle. Previously, he was Microsoft Chair Professor in Innovation in Computing in Australia. Prior to this in Australia, he was Dean of School of Computing and IT at University of Western Sydney. Before coming to Australia, Vijay headed worldwide Secure Systems Research for Hewlett-Packard Labs based at the European Headquarters in Bristol, UK. Under his leadership at HP Labs, some 6 different security technologies were transferred into highly successful HP products. He also headed the Technical Security Strategy Initiative at HP under the Senior Vice President, USA. Before HP, Vijay
was Research Manager at British Telecom Research Labs. U.K. Vijay attained his Ph.D in Computer and Communication Security from Plymouth and Exeter Universities in the UK in 1984, sponsored by British Telecom Research Labs. He obtained his Electronic Engineering Hons degree from Sussex University, UK in 1981. Vijay has been on several industry Boards such as the Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board (Microsoft, USA), SAP International Security Advisory Board (SAP Corporation, Germany/USA) as well as at Hewlett-Packard. He has also been on several Government Advisory Committees such as the Australian Government's Peak Security Advisory Body, ITSEAG, for the Ministry of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy, Australia, Prime Ministerial Cyber Security Task Force (CSTF),
Strategic Research Priorities Committee, Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia, Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts and a member of the Australian Academy of Science National Committee on Information and Communication Systems. Vijay has published more than 450 peer reviewed papers in International Journals and Conferences and has been on the Editorial Boards of several journals including ACM Transactions on Information System Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Systems, IEEE Transactions in Information Forensics and Security IEEE Transactions in Cloud Computing and International Journal of Information Security, Springer.
When: Sept. 27, 8:45am EDT
Who: Dr. Sudip Mittal, Mississippi State University
Abstract –
As threat actors become increasingly advanced and computer systems more complex, there is a growing need to develop technologies that provide adaptive data-driven incident response solutions. Using diverse data sources, we can build systems that impact a variety of cyber operations. The use of AI to solve cybersecurity problems has been gaining traction within industry and academia, in part as a response to widespread malware attacks. This offers data-driven automation which enables security systems to identify and respond to cyber threats in real-time. I will present the next generation of cyber defense systems, where we create deep neural networks that learn the differences between normal and malware-infected environments. We improve performance by augmenting these models with Threat Intelligence stored in Cybersecurity Knowledge Graphs.
Bio –
Dr. Sudip Mittal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Mississippi State University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2019. His primary research interests are cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. His goal is to develop the next generation of cyber defense systems that help protect various organizations and people. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE societies. His work has been funded by the NSF and Department of Defense
Modern computer systems are large and heterogeneous. Their complexity is hardly manageable by a human being, especially when it comes to take timely decisions to protect them from an ongoing cyber-attack.
In the last decade, the research community has explored the field of cyber-defense from several points of view, which range, among the others, from static analysis of the code and dynamic analysis of the behavior of the executables, to the design of algorithms for intrusion detection. Intrusion response is another important field that has started to receive attention in the last 5 years.
However, despite the advancements in each one of the aforementioned fields, the vision of an autonomic self-protecting system is still far from being realized. Indeed, automatically defending a computer system at run-time encompasses a large number of complex activities, that range from data capture, management and analysis, to automated decision making and automated systems operations.
In this workshop, we solicit high quality contributions that fit with the overarching idea of creating a fully automated protection system. The aim of the workshop is to share new findings, exchange ideas and discuss research challenges on the following topics (not an exhaustive list):
● Big Data collection, processing, integration, and analysis for self-protecting systems
● Intrusion Detection, either signature-based or anomaly-based
● Off-line static code-analysis and behavioral analysis of executables
● Cyber-Deception: approaches, analysis, honeypots, metrics, moving target defense
● Cyber-Ranges design and realization
● Intrusion Response and systems modeling
● Risk Management frameworks and actor modeling
● Software engineering for self-protecting systems
● Artificial Intelligence applied to self-protecting systems
● Software-defined self-protecting systems
● Machine Learning applied to self-protecting systems
● Frameworks for the integration of self-protecting systems
● Performance management and evaluation of self-protecting systems
● Evaluation of implementations based on cutting edge technologies
Furthermore, we solicit submissions that examine the self-protection problem from an holistic perspective, that is, that will consider the overall picture and propose novel software architectures, frameworks and technologies to ease the realization of self-protecting systems.
This year we are pleased to announce the Cyber Resilience and Antifragility in Complex, Distributed Systems (CyRA) special session (Follow the link for the CFP)
Paper submission: June 14th 2021 June 30th, 2021July 15th, 2021
Author notification: July 31st, 2021
Final Manuscript (camera-ready paper): August 20th, 2021
Accepted papers will be included in the ACSOS'2020 Companion Volume published by IEEE Computer Society Press and made available as a part of the IEEE Digital Library. Papers must thus be in the same format as the conference proceedings and may not be more than 6 pages in length.
Papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format according to the instructions on the submission website and review criteria
Submission website:
Emiliano Casalicchio, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Stefano Iannucci, Mississippi State University, MS ,USA
Cristina Alcaraz, University of Malaga, Spain
Ghita Berrada, King's College London, UK
Valeria Cardellini, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy
Rogério de Lemos, University of Kent, UK
Flavia Delicato, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil
Rose Gamble, University of Tulsa, OK, USA
Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College London, UK
Ananth Grama, Purdue University, IN, USA
Narges Khakpour, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Andrea Montemaggio, Mississippi State University, MS, USA
Charilaos Skandylas, Linnaeus University, Sweden
...
For information about Registration, Conference Location, VISA, Transport and Accommodation please check the conference web site https://conf.researchr.org/home/acsos-2021