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Reports
Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2009 Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2008 PDF

GTISC Annual Report Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2008 PDF
Learn more about GTISC areas of research and publications in the GTISC annual report.

 

Latest NEws

News for anti-censorship tool, Collage, and press coverage from GTISC Assistant Professor Nick Feamster

Learn more about Collage: Defeating Censorship with User-Generated Content and read press articles about the tool.

Is cyberwar lawful?

"The answer is probably not -- at least an unprovoked attack -- based on extensive new legal research appearing in an upcoming issue of the British journal INFO. The research describes a 150-year-old series of Geneva Conventions relating to cyberwar. However, a precise answer to the question is impossible because no one has actually defined the term "cyberwar" and reaching broad agreement on a definition seems problematic at best." Column by Past GTISC Advisory Board Member, Tony Rutowski, ComputerWorld, 08/08/10 [Read more about the research]

'Viruses Are Winning': Malware Threat Outpaces Antivirus Software

"For the last 20 years, hackers and antivirus software programmers have played a cat-and-mouse game over computer security. Whenever one side would innovate, the other would catch up. And for most of that time, the conflict remained a benign contest between tech savvy vandals looking for street cred and the professional programmers trained to counter them." Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily, 08/02/10

GTISC Assistant Professor Nick Feamster, Sloan Fellow and Presidential Early Career Recipient, involved in "new weapon in Internet censorship arms race"

"Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr." Layer 8 by Michael Cooney, NetworkWorld, 07/09/10 [Read more about Collage]

CoC Dean Zvi Galil and GTISC Director, Mustaque Ahamad, is pleased to announce Patrick Traynor is the recipient of the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award

GTISC Professor, Patrick Traynor, received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. According to NSF, "This is the most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations." His proposal is titled, "CAREER: Protecting User Data on Lost, Stolen and Damaged Mobile Phones." 07-13-10

Kraken botnet re-emerges 318,000 nodes strong

"Kraken, a large and difficult-to-detect botnet that peaked in 2008 and was dismantled by early 2009, is back, and anti-virus solutions are struggling to detect it, according to researchers at Georgia Tech Information Security Center." Angela Moscaritolo, SC Magazine, 06-30-10 [Read more about the Kraken botnet]

» past news articles

 

Save the Date

October 7, 2010

2010 GTISC Security Summit

"Evolving Nature of Cyber Security Threats"

9:00am - 11:30am • Ferst Center for the Arts

The 2010 GTISC Security Summit will be held on Thursday, October 7 (the summit is coordinated with FutureMedia Fest (FM) and will be part of the morning session of FM on Oct 7). This year, we have brought back Georgia Tech graduates and GTISC friends who have distinguished themselves in the cyber security field for the Summit. The theme of the summit is going to the "evolving nature of cyber security threats". The line up is as follows:

Keynote: Howard Schmidt (tentative), White House Cyber Security Coordinator and former Georgia Tech Professor of Practice.

Panel Moderator: Rich DeMillo, Georgia Tech PhD, Distinguished Professor of Computing, College of Computer Science; Professor of Management; and former Dean, College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Panelists:

 

People

Chaitrali Amrutkar

Chaitrali Amrutkar

Why did you pick GTISC?
I entered USA and Georgia Tech to pursue my masters in computer science. I had worked on some exciting telephony related projects during my undergrad. GTISC has a variety of projects related to communications security and thus I got involved in GTISC as a graduate research assistant during my masters. I worked on various research projects at GTISC, which manifested into the desire of pursuing a research-oriented career. PhD was the next obvious step on that career path. I chose to continue at GTISC because of the solid reputation of GTISC’s security research group and my already established comfort level of working here.

What is your research area and why did you select it?
I am a first year PhD student and have worked on a couple of areas in security. I recently finished a project on user privacy in context sensitive applications. Protecting user data privacy remains the biggest concern in realizing today's context sensitive applications like location services. We designed and developed a privacy-preserving framework for context sensitive applications, which can run efficiently on hardware constrained mobile devices.

Nowadays everyone carries a cellular phone or some form of wireless mobile device. These mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous and are bound to introduce security and privacy threats to the communication infrastructure and users in the future. Communications technologies fascinate me and thus I am very interested in working on security in communication networks. In general, my interests are in cellular security, user and content privacy and network security.

How do you see your future and your future research?
I believe that there will always be ways to better the existing communications networks technology, be it in terms of performance or availability. By and large, a new architectural invention in these networks also introduces new potential security threats. I expect that there will be a good deal of research in my areas of interest even in the future and I would like to try and contribute towards them. I have yet to decide whether I want to stay in academia or branch out to industry research after graduation.

How do you see women in computing by year 2015 (5 years from now)?
The alarming rate of reduction of women in computing is a concern, especially in the US. The percentage of women earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science has dropped from 37% to 22% in the last two decades. In my opinion, lack of education and interest in computer science are the major reasons behind this drop. Educating high-school girls and their parents about the good income, social respect and work satisfaction in computer science related occupations, can help reverse the trend in the future.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~camrutk/personal.html


 

PAST Events

GTISC Demo Day

March 29, 2010

3:00pm - 5:00pm – Klaus Building - GTISC Common Area

Demo Day Winners Announced

The visitors were impressed with the great work that is going on here at GTISC and the effort the students put into these demos is key in showcasing our research. And with great pleasure GTISC announces the winners of the GTISC Demo Day Competition:
 
“PinDr0p” – Vijay A. Balasubramaniyan and Aamir Poonawalla

“Leveraging Forensic Tools for VM Introspection” –  Bryan D. Payne and Brendan Dolan-Gavitt

Demo Day Event Photo Gallery

Demos

Ether: Malware Analysis via Hardware Virtualization Extensions
Paul Royal

Anax: A Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving DNS Security
Manos Antonakakis, David Dagon, Xiapu Luo, Roberto Perdisci and Wenke Lee

Notos: Building a Dynamic Reputation System for DNS,
Manos Antonakakis, Roberto Perdisci, David Dagon, Wenke Lee and Nick Feamster

PRIVACYGRID: Supporting Anonymous Location Queries in Mobile Environments
Balaji Palanisamy, Bhuvan Bamba

Spy vs. Spy: Location-Oblivious Rendezvous at Starbucks
(Oblivious Context Sensitive Communications)

Chaitrali Amrutkar, Rishikesh Naik, Patrick Traynor, Italo Dacosta

Cellular Device Remote Repair
Ferdinand Schober, Yacin Nadji

Circumventing Policy-Based Listening Restrictions via Smart-Phone Accelerometers
Frank Park

Mix-In-Place Anonymity Network
Nilesh Nipane

Leveraging Forensic Tools for Virtual Machine Introspection
Bryan Payne, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt

 

BotMiner: Clustering Analysis of Network Traffic for Protocol and Structure-Independent Botnet Detection
Junjie Zhang

Traffic Forwarding in the GT Apiary
Peter Huang

Securing Enterprise Networks Using Traffic Tagging
Anirudh Ramachandran, Yogesh Mundada, Mukarram Bin Tariq, Nick Feamster

OpenFlow Campus Trials
Hyojoon Kim, Ankur Nayak

PinDr0p: Using Single-Ended Audio Features to Determine Call Provenance
Vijay A. Balasubramaniyan, Aamir Poonawalla

CacoPhony: Structural and Behavioral Analysis of Twitter to Differentiate Between Legitimate and Malicious Users
Viswanathan Mahalingam, Arjun Maheswaran, Vijay A. Balasubramaniyan

Study of Static Classification of Social Spam Profiles in MySpace
Danesh Irani

MedVault
Daisuke Mashima

Patient Policy Manager
Ketan Kalgaonkar

eDemocracy:  Secure Computer Systems that Enable Democratic Processes
Emily Ivey, Duncan Osborn, Chris Julian, Michael T. Hunter


» archived events