ASIA ’12/SKM 2012 and NYS Cyber Security Conference

The combined NYS Cyber Security Conference, the Annual Symposium on Information Assurance (ASIA) / Secure Knowledge Management – A Workshop (SKM) are just 11 days away on June 5 and 6 at the Empire State Plaza in Albany NY. This is one of the best events security of the year  in the Northeast United States to attend and provides 7 parallel tracks that cover every thing including peer reviewed papers, security training, talks from leading industry practitioners, and two oustanding keynotes.

The 7 tracks include ASIA / SKM, cloud security, cyber’s impact, risk management, analysis of cyber threats, human factors, kids safe online, case studies, social media and mobiledevices, forensics and incident response, risk mitigation, cyber guidance and tips, and legal issues. We are lucky to have two outstanding keynotes – Billy Rios (Team Lead, Google) and Melissa Hathaway (former Director of the Joint Interagency Cyber Task Force in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence). We also have a featured speaker for ASIA / SKM in Merril Warkentin who is a Carole Ferguson Notable Scholar in the College of Business at Mississippi State University.

The registration is free for the presenters and government employees, $50 for not-for-profits and $200 for the private sector. This is the best deal for a security conference anywhere. Here are the links to the events.

ASIA/ SKM website:

http://www.albany.edu/iasymposium

Register for the event here:

http://www.dhses.ny.gov/ocs/awareness-training-events/conference/2012/index.cfm

 

Workshop on NanoSensors: Self-Organization and Swarm Robotics

Alas! The conference is over. Whew! What a great workshop – fabulous speakers, fascinating talks, and a dedicated audience who stayed on to the bitter end. So what did we learn? Some of the most fascinating work on nano-biology that promises to change the field of medicine but is about a decade away. The idea of targeted drug delivery seems to be the most potent application so far. The fundamental problem lies in how to package and transport the medicine through the body to the target areas. While living organisms have remarkable nano-machines, building artificial nano-machines is extremely difficult. Some researchers have cleverly coupled nano-materials with other naturally occurring nano-components to create working nano-machines.

The conference had two parts to it: a one-day workshop on nano-robotics and swarm behavior and a two-day conference on nano-communications. The workshop included some of the top researchers in the area of nano-robotics. The workshop brought together computational as well as experimental researchers. The workshop was opened by Sanjay Goel who discussed the need for investigating self-organization in context of nanosensors and extolled the need to develop a general theory of self-organization that transcends multiple applications. Stephen Bush provided a set of thought provoking questions to set the groundwork for the workshop. Dinos provided an overview of the entire field of nano-robotics and presented a roadmap for nano-medicine applications. He showed nano-machines constructed from biological materials such as peptides and proteins. Ari provided an overview of his research on swarm behavior where using local rules he is able to simulate construction of structures. Nikolaus provided an interesting application of swarm robotics using micro-robots (not nano-robots) for turbine inspection. He showed that performance using a swarm of robots is comparable to deliberate path planning which is very expensive. Metin Sitti provided more applications using micro-robots that are inspired by insect behavior, including, climbing robots, robots that walk on water and flying robots. John Barker provided a glimpse into the very ambitious project of creating smart dust, which can be used for harvesting and storing energy. Jonathan Bachrach provided a programming language to make swarm robotics much easier. Michael Carpenter discussed sensors based on quantum dots and their potential applications in inspection.

So what did we learn from the workshop?

It was clear from the workshop that practical applications of nano-medicine were at least a decade away; nevertheless it showed a roadmap towards achieving that. The main application of nano-robotics envisaged so far is targeted drug delivery for areas such as tumors, which requires transportation of the medicine through the blood vessels. What we also learned was that using artificial components it is not feasible to create nano machines however machines at a micro-level could be created. It became clear that swarm behavior using micro-level machines if not difficult had marginal gains because of the size of the swarm required. Nano-machines using existing biological components are not only possible but also a reality today. Though not available commercially, several projects have shown viability of nano-machines using nano-components from cells. Another key issue that is faced in the area of nano-biology is transportation of nano-machines. This can be done using bacteria that have a natural affinity to specific areas of the body (such as tumors) or by using magnetically charged nano-machines.

~ Sanjay Goel & Stephen Bush

 

Workshop on nanosensors: Self-Organization and Swarm Robotics

We are running the Nano-Net 2008 Conference and Workshop on Nanosensors: Self-Organization and Swarm Robotics. Nano-Net 2008 runs from Sept. 14-16 in Boston this year. This will be an interactive event with some of the top researchers in the field in attendance. We will use this blog to extend discussions on the topic beyond the conference.

We are looking for relevant questions for discussions during the conference and the workshop. Conference attendees can use the free Wi-Fi in the conference facility to post questions, but we welcome questions from members who are unable to participate locally. We also hope that this discussion will continue after the conference ends. Go to http://sanjaygoel.wordpress.com/nanosensors to participate.

~ Sanjay

 

ASIA ’08 – Annual Symposium on Information Assurance

We have been running the Annual Symposium on Information Assurance in conjunction with the NYS Cyber Security Conference for the last three years which is co-sponsored by the NYS Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination, the NYS Forum and the University at Albany, State University of New York.

 

This symposium attempts to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners with the symposium catering to the research and the conference catering to practice. This is the first year we used the acronym ASIA – thanks to Bolek Szymanski from RPI for suggesting it.

 

 

We had two excellent keynote speakers for this year’s symposium: Billy Rios from Microsoft and John Crain from ICANN. Billy is a bright researcher and an excellent speaker and yet one of the most modest people I have met. I saw him first at a BlackHat conference in Washington and was very impressed with him. He mesmerized his audience for a full hour in a packed conference room talking about phishing and telling stories about his marine corps past!

 

 

 

John talked about how the Domain Name System works on the Internet and how secure it is. I first met John at a conference in Germany organized by the Russians where we both were in the Russian cross hairs as western imperialists. John’s talk was very revealing which the audience thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks to both John and Billy for excellent talks.

 

We had a plenary talk for the Symposium and the Conference combined that featured RFID hacking using tools developed by Adam Laurie from UK. This was the featured event of the entire event with about 500 people packed into the Sawyer Theatre. The hacking demonstration was a skit based on the theme of Matrix where Neo (Sanjay Pon), Trinity (Damira Pon), Morpheus (Kwaku Essel), and the women in Red (Rachel Niebour) worked together to demonstrate social engineering and RFID hacks on credit cards and building entry cards. The demonstration also included a memory attack to break into a password protected machine.

A highlight of the symposium was the dinner at my home featuring vegetarian Indian cuisine catered by Karavalli. We all had a great time! Next year we will do this again. The call for papers will be out later in the year, but you can look at some information as well as proceedings and pictures from previous years’ symposia at http://www.albany.edu/iasymposium

 

Welcome!

Hi. My name is Sanjay Goel and I’m an Associate Professor in the Information Technology Management Department of the School of Business at the University at Albany State University of New York – try saying that 10 times fast! I’m also the Director of Research at the NYS Center for Information Forensics and Assurance at the University.

Previously, I worked at GE Global Research for 6 years where I brought good things to life in the form of aircraft turbine designs that have been implemented in many of the commercial aircraft flying today (my imagination was definitely at work). Jumping from engineering to the information security and teaching was like moving from one continent to another - but I’ve done that too, so it is just another incredible experience and challenge!

I am a proud graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at New Delhi. I was absolutely against doing a masters or a Ph.D, leaving my home in India, and becoming a teacher. I don’t know what happened, but I ended up in the U.S. and completed a masters degree from Rutgers and then a doctoral degree at RPI while I was at GE. As soon as I was done, I wanted to dump the corporate lifestyle and jumped into academia. That’s how I ended up at UAlbany.

Since I was expected to do research, I thought I might as well do it in something interesting. I really wanted to be a hacker, but ended up helping fight against them (the bad ones anyway). In information security (and information technology in general) everything changes so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with what is going on. I wanted to create a blog where I could express my thoughts about what’s happening near the tip of the iceberg and occasionally give a glimpse of what’s teeming in the deep dark depths of our cyber oceans.

Feel free to send me news about the latest information security happenings and discuss/comment on my posts. Information security requires a lot of collaboration and cooperation, so I look forward to hearing from you.

- Sanjay