Zeek and Jupyter Full-Day Security Training at the 2023 NSF Summit

This year the Summit is pleased to partner with Zeek and Project Jupyter to offer full-day training and a workshop on Monday October 23, 2023. 

Zeek, an open source network security monitoring tool, will offer two full-day training sessions. “Hands-on Zeek Scripting” will walk attendees through the fundamentals of Zeek Scripting along with some practical exercises. “Intermediate to Zeek” will teach attendees how to set up their own Zeek cluster deployments in production together with all the cluster components and the new Zeek management framework.

Project Jupyter is an open-source project sponsored by the non-profit NumFOCUS,  that supports interactive data science and scientific computing. The “Jupyter Security Workshop” will expand on the current Jupyter security practices by focusing on the following near- and long-term goals: 

• Bring together people interested in contributing to security in Jupyter.
• A white paper on “Jupyter Security Best Practices”.
• Summarizing Jupyter development practices that target security.
• Recommendations for security governance within the Project Jupyter governance model.
• Based on any security gaps in documentation, software, processes, or other areas, identify potential support mechanisms to address them.

All of these sessions will only be offered in-person. There is not a remote participation option and the sessions will not be recorded. More information on these and all of the Summit sessions can be found here.

Due to LBNL site access requirements, in-person registration is required by September 29.  The registration cut-off for inclusion in the Hotel Shattuck room block with the reduced rate is 5:00pm PST on Friday, September 22, 2023. 

Trusted CI Webinar: Improving the Privacy and Security of Data for Wastewater-based Epidemiology, Sept. 25th @ 11am ET

Arizona State University's Ni Trieu is presenting the talk, Improving the Privacy and Security of Data for Wastewater-based Epidemiology, on September 25th at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

As the use of wastewater for public health surveillance continues to expand, inevitably sample collection will move from centralized wastewater treatment plants to sample collection points within the sewer collection system to isolate individual neighborhoods and communities. Collecting data at this geospatial resolution will help identify variation in select biomarkers within neighborhoods, ultimately making the wastewater-derived data more actionable. However a challenge in achieving this is the nature of the wastewater collection system, which aggregates and commingles wastewater from various municipalities. Thus various stakeholders from different cities must collectively provide information to separate wastewater catchments to achieve neighborhood-specific public health information. Data sharing restrictions and the need for anonymity complicates this process.

This talk presents our approaches to enabling data privacy in wastewater-based epidemiology. Our methodology is built upon a cryptographic technique, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), ensuring privacy. Additionally, we outline a technique to enhance the performance of HE, which could be of independent interest.

Speaker Bio:

Ni Trieu is currently an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University (ASU). Her research interests lie in the area of cryptography and security, with a specific focus on secure computation and its applications such as private set intersection, private database queries, and privacy-preserving machine learning. Prior to joining ASU, she was a postdoc at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. degree from Oregon State University.

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Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events. To submit topics or requests to present, see our call for presentations. Archived presentations are available on our site under "Past Events."

Registration is open for the 2023 NSF Cybersecurity Summit!

Registration is open for the 2023 NSF Cybersecurity Summit! Please join us at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA from October 23-26. If you are unable to join in person, please register to join virtually instead. Attendees will include cybersecurity practitioners, technical leaders, and risk owners from within the NSF Major Facilities and CI community, as well as key stakeholders and thought leaders from the broader scientific and cybersecurity communities. The Summit provides a forum for National Science Foundation (NSF) funded scientists, researchers, cybersecurity, and cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals, and stakeholders to develop a community and share best practices. The Summit will offer attendees training sessions and workshops with hands-on learning of security tools, security program development, and compliance for research. 

Due to site access requirements, registration is required by September 29.  Later registration cannot be accommodated.  Please register by September 29. 

Thank you on behalf of the Program and Organizing Committees. We look forward to seeing you there!

Cybersecurity Research Transition To Practice (TTP) Virtual Workshop (Sep 14-15 2023)

Interested in Cybersecurity Research Transition To Practice (TTP)? Join us for a free virtual workshop, funded by NSF, on September 14th (2pm-5pm Central Time) and September 15th (8am-12pm Central Time). See the flyer below for more details.

Please register at: https://forms.gle/pLTx1EYPoMxgueu1A   

For more information about Trusted CI's Cybersecurity Research Transition to Practice (TTP) program, please visit: https://www.trustedci.org/ttp

Trusted CI at August 24 MS-CC All Hands Meeting

This month's Minority Serving - Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) All Hands Meeting will feature a presentation by Jim Basney about the Trusted CI Framework for Cybersecurity Programs. Join us on Thursday, August 24 at 12pm ET for Jim's presentation followed by a discussion about cybersecurity at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). Visit https://www.ms-cc.org/calendar/all-hands-meetings for Zoom coordinates and additional details, including past meeting recordings. 

Trusted CI also participated in the 2023 MS-CC Annual Meeting in May. Visit https://www.ms-cc.org/2023-annual-meeting for presentation materials and other information from that meeting.

Trusted CI Webinar: Leveraging Adaptive Framework for Open Source Data Access Solutions, August 28th @11am EST

Clemson University's Jeremy Grieshop is presenting the talk, Leveraging Adaptive Framework for Open Source Data Access Solutions, on August 28th at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

More than a decade ago, Clemson University outlined the requirements needed to integrate several campus-wide enterprise applications in a way that would automate the exchange of data between them, and establish the relationships of that data to the unique identities that represented all users within the system, including faculty, staff, students, alumni and applicants. There would be no direct access of data, except through applications that were approved and had established Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) contracts in place. This project was known as the Clemson Vault. 

Within the Identity Management space, solutions for automating the provisioning of identities are offered by several vendors these days. However, mileage and cost vary when you wish to integrate arbitrary university resources, such as mailing lists, disk storage, building card access, and course registrations. Open source solutions, with all of the above requirements, are non-existent.

At Clemson University, we combined licensed vendor software and in-house apps, scripts and procedures to create a data integration solution that met the original requirements. This implementation has served us well for many years, but many of the drawbacks to the current design prompted us to begin pulling out many of these features into its own project, where we could collaborate on features and enhancements for the future with institutions outside of our own organization. The patterns, interfaces, and source code that emerged from the original vault were extracted out, embellished and migrated into an open source repository known as Adaptive Framework (https://github.com/afw-org/afw).

Clemson University has been working on this project for several years now, and has recently released this open source framework for building data access solutions that provide web service API’s, data transformation tools, real-time data provisioning and an authorization architecture. The framework that has emerged offers a built-in scripting language, pre-compiled server-side applications and an administrative web interface.

Although it was originally designed for the implementation of an open source identity vault, we envision a broader adoption of this framework for other data-driven needs, such as extending databases with metadata, building policy-based authorization systems, and integrating data repositories with a metadata catalog, and varying levels of access control, across federated environments.

Our goal with this project is to gather external support from both commercial and public institutions to help make this framework sustainable moving forward.

Speaker Bio:

Jeremy Grieshop is a software engineer (B.S. Miami University, M.S. Clemson University) and has been employed by Clemson University since 2001. His role has been in software development for the Identity Management team and has been directly involved in the software design and implementation of many of the authentication and provisioning software, along with self service tools that are in place at Clemson University today.

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Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events. To submit topics or requests to present, see our call for presentations. Archived presentations are available on our site under "Past Events."

Trusted CI and NSF RSI-ISAO

As NSF's Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE), Trusted CI is engaged with the connections between cybersecurity and research security - see the recently published Trusted CI Five-Year Strategic Plan for details. An effective cybersecurity program enables NSF facilities and projects to protect cyberinfrastructure from misuse by a breadth of adversaries, including adversaries that may be motivated by foreign government interference. While Trusted CI's cybersecurity mission is distinct from the research security mission of NSF's planned Research Security and Integrity Information Sharing Analysis Organization (RSI-ISAO), Trusted CI looks forward to coordinating and collaborating with the RSI-ISAO when appropriate, with a common goal for "research that is as open as possible, but as secure as necessary" [1].

RSI-ISAO proposing organizations, please note: Trusted CI will not be providing letters of commitment for the NSF 23-613 solicitation [1], but proposals may cite this blog post when discussing plans for collaboration with Trusted CI. 

Trusted CI welcomes inquiries and feedback. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2023/nsf23613/nsf23613.htm