Trusted CI Webinar: Securing Medical Imaging AI Models Against Adversarial Attacks, Monday August 25th @ 10am Central

University of Pittsburgh's Shandong Wu is presenting the talk, Securing Medical Imaging AI Models Against Adversarial Attacks, on Monday August 25th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

While AI is increasingly present in clinical practice especially for medical imaging, it is imminent to ensure cybersecurity of imaging diagnostic AI models. Newly advanced adversarial attacks pose a threat to the safety of medical AI models, but little is known about the characteristics of this threat. Medical adversarial attacks may lead to serious consequences including patient harm, liability of healthcare providers, and other ethical issues or crimes. It is imperative to study this cybersecurity issue to mitigate potential negative consequences and to ensure safety of health care. In this talk, the speaker will discuss cyber vulnerabilities of deep learning-based medical imaging diagnosis models under adversarial attacks, show real-world experiments on how adversarial attacks can fool AI models to decrease diagnosis performance and to confuse experienced radiologists, and present several methods of defending adversarial attacks to secure AI models in medical imaging applications.

Speaker Bio: 

Shandong Wu, PhD, is a Professor in Radiology, Biomedical Informatics, Bioengineering, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Wu leads the Intelligent Computing for Clinical Imaging (ICCI) lab, and he is the founding director of the Pittsburgh Center for AI Innovation in Medical Imaging. Dr. Wu’s work focuses on developing trustworthy medical imaging AI for clinical/translational applications. Dr. Wu's lab received multiple research awards such as the RSNA Trainee Research Award twice in 2017 and 2019, the 2021 AANS Natus Resident/Fellow Award for Traumatic Brain Injury, the 2025 SPIE Imaging Informatics Best Paper Award, etc. Dr. Wu’s research is supported by NIH, NSF, multiple research foundations, Amazon AWS, Nvidia, and many institutional funding sources. Dr. Wu has published > 190 journal papers and conference papers/abstracts in both the computing and clinical fields. His research has been featured in hundreds of scientific news reports and media outlets in the world. 

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Trusted CI Webinar: TIPPSS to improve Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security for Cyberphysical Systems, Monday July 28th @ 10am Central

Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub's Florence Hudson is presenting the talk, TIPPSS to improve Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security for Cyberphysical Systems, on Monday July 28th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

The challenge of providing end to end trust and security for operational technology systems has been a growing challenge and increasingly imperative. An IEEE effort was begun in 2016 to tackle that challenge, resulting in the publication of the first IEEE/UL TIPPSS standard (IEEE/UL 2933-2024) and the awarding of the 2024 IEEE Standards Association Emerging Technology Award to the TIPPSS standard working group.  The goal of the TIPPSS standard, which is envisioned to be a family of standards, is to improve Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security (TIPPSS) for cyber-physical systems, beginning with Clinical Internet of Things and expanding to research infrastructure, the energy grid, distributed energy resources, and more. In this webinar we will discuss the initial IEEE/UL TIPPSS standard for clinical IoT data and device interoperability, the details of the technical and process elements of the standard, and the opportunity to apply it to all operational technology. Future TIPPSS presentations planned include "TIPPSS for navigating a changing cybersecurity landscape at the Electron-Ion Collider and other scientific research facilities" in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory at the ICALEPS 2025 conference (The 20th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems) September 20-26, 2025 in Chicago, bringing the TIPPSS discussion to research infrastructure and the IT systems that support it. Trusted CI's initiatives in Secure by Design and the Trusted CI Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix are very complementary to the TIPPSS initiative, and there is more we can do as a community in this effort together. Join us to discuss the imperatives and possibilities.

Speaker Bio: 

Florence Hudson is Executive Director of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, leading over $10M in projects funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Transportation. She is also Founder & CEO of FDHint, LLC, a global advanced technology consulting firm. A former IBM Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Internet2 Senior Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer, Special Advisor for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and aerospace engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and Grumman Aerospace Corporation, she is an Editor in Chief and Author for Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, IEEE, and other publications. She leads the development of global IEEE/UL standards to increase Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security (TIPPSS) for connected healthcare data and devices and cyberphysical systems, and is Vice Chair of the IEEE Engineering Medicine & Biology Society Standards Committee. She earned her Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering degree from Princeton University, and executive education certificates from Harvard Business School and Columbia University.

IEEE Emerging Technology Award

IEEE 2933 Working Group Leadership Team

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Trusted CI Webinar: Towards Practical Confidential High-Performance Computing, Monday June 23rd @ 10am Central

Indiana University's Chenghong Wang is presenting the talk, Towards Practical Confidential High-Performance Computing, on Monday June 23rd at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

The democratization of high-performance computing (HPC)—driven by a paradigm shift toward cloud-based solutions—has unlocked unprecedented scalability in data sharing, interdisciplinary collaboration, and large-scale analytics. Yet, despite these advancements, the lack of strong privacy protection mechanisms, particularly for sensitive or regulated data, remains a significant barrier preventing critical domains from fully leveraging cloud HPC. In this webinar, I will present our group’s research toward enabling a practical confidential HPC paradigm—one that empowers HPC providers to securely process sensitive workloads with provable security and privacy guarantees.
 

My talk will be structured around three key pillars that underpin our approach: practical data-in-use security, data governance and compliance, and usability. First, I will introduce our vision for a next-generation trusted execution environment (TEE) architecture tailored for HPC—designed to deliver HPC-grade efficiency for large-scale, parallel workloads, while upholding strict data-in-use security guarantees. Second, I will discuss how we leverage formal methods to validate compliance with complex governance and data-sharing policies—ensuring that even dynamic, multi-party workloads can remain policy-aligned. Finally, I will share our ongoing work in developing new usability frameworks and programming abstractions designed to make confidential computing accessible to domain scientists—lowering the barrier for adoption without requiring expertise in cryptography or secure systems.

Speaker Bio: 

Chenghong Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. He is a core faculty member of the Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SPICE) group and affiliated with the NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC). His research focuses on building full-stack solutions for privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics (PPDSA), bridging theory, systems, and architectural design. His work spans trusted execution environments, differential privacy, applied cryptography, and secure data systems. Dr. Wang's research has been published in premier venues across systems, security, and AI, including SIGMOD, VLDB, USENIX Security, MICRO, NeurIPS, IJCAI, ICCV, and EMNLP. Beyond his core focus, he actively collaborates across disciplines, contributing to projects in AI, machine learning, hardware systems, healthcare, and biomedicine. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University, where he was advised by Prof. Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Prof. Kartik Nayak.

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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 Webinar: Conducting Responsible Human-Centered AI Research, Monday May 19th @ 10am Central

Clemson University's Bart Knijnenburg is presenting the talk, Conducting Responsible Human-Centered AI Research, on Monday May 19th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

With the recent rise of LLMs, it becomes increasingly possible (and necessary) to conduct human-subjects studies with AI tools. However, integrating AI in human-subjects research raises concerns about participant privacy, safety, and the confidentiality of research data. These concerns are exacerbated by the fact that many AI researchers have limited experience with human-subjects research, and most ethics review boards (e.g. IRBs) have little knowledge about AI.

In this talk, I present findings from a series of investigations into human-centered AI research studies: our team systematically reviewed AI-related studies published at the ACM SigCHI conference, we interviewed researchers who conducted human-subjects studies with LLMs, and we conducted a scenario-based study to unpack study participants' opinions about AI-based research.  

We find that (1) many papers lack important details about basic study parameters, (2) researchers often fail to disclose the use of LLMs to research participants, and (3) participants are sensitive to study parameters like anonymization, data retention and consent, but are unaware of the threats of third-party data sharing and of data leakage through model training. I will discuss these findings, and more, during the talk.

Speaker Bio: 

Dr. Bart Knijnenburg is an Associate Professor in Human-Centered Computing at Clemson University where he co-directs the Humans And Technology Lab (HATLab). His research explores the societal, social, and psychological aspects of human interaction with intelligent systems. His research has been funded by the NSF (including a CAREER award), the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and corporate gifts.

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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 Webinar: The Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix, Monday March 31st @10am Central

Trusted CI's Mark Krenz is presenting the talk, The Trusted CI Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix, on Monday March 31st at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

Operational Technology (OT), when installed on an organization's network, becomes part of the overall cyber attack surface for an organization. When procuring this OT, it is important for the purchasing organization to understand how it will integrate with the existing network and security controls as well as understand what new risks it might introduce. The Trusted CI Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix (the Matrix) provides a prioritized list of questions for organizations to send to manufacturers and suppliers to try to get as much of this information as possible.

In this webinar, we will walk through what security issues impact OT, the role of procurement in mitigating security risks, our reasoning and process for developing the Matrix, and a walk through on how to use the Matrix at your organization. Questions and shared experiences with OT are encouraged.

TARGET AUDIENCE:
Organizational leadership, procurement department, IT, cybersecurity

The Matrix can be found at https://trustedci.org/ot-matrix

Speaker Bio: 

Chief Security Analyst Mark Krenz is focused on cybersecurity operations, research, and education. He has more than two decades of experience in system, network administration, programming, and system security and has spent the last decade focused on cybersecurity. He also serves as the CISO of Trusted CI.

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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 Webinar: Trusted Volunteer Edge-Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows, Monday February 24th @10am Central

Mizzou's Prasad Calyam is presenting the talk, Trusted Volunteer Edge-Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows, on Monday February 24th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

The unprecedented growth in networked edge devices (e.g., scientific instruments, sensors) has caused a data deluge in scientific application communities. The data processing is increasingly relying on distributed computing to cope with the heterogeneity, scale, and velocity of the data. At the same time, there is an abundance of low-cost computation resources that can be used for “volunteer edge-cloud computing” (VEC), where collaborators in a community (e.g., bioinformatics, manufacturing) contribute their resources to form a distributed infrastructure to execute scientific workflows. In this talk, a VEC management reference architecture and a related framework implementation will be presented for support of trusted resource allocation in VEC environments for scientific data-intensive workflows. We demonstrate how our novel scheduling approach optimizes task allocation on VEC nodes by balancing workflow requirements and resource preferences, improving latency, task completion times, and resource utilization efficiency. Lastly, we outline our recent efforts to ensure privacy-preservation of the scientific workflow execution in VEC environments by adopting principles from the confidential computing paradigm.

Speaker Bio: 

Prasad Calyam is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor and the Greg L. Gilliom Professor of Cybersecurity in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Missouri-Columbia, and Director of the Center for Cyber Education, Research and Infrastructure (Mizzou CERI). His research and development areas of interest include: Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. He has published over 235 peer-reviewed papers in various conference and journal venues. As the Principal Investigator, he has successfully led teams of graduate, undergraduate and postdoctoral fellows in Federal, State, University and Industry sponsored R&D projects sponsored by National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Security Agency and others. His basic research and software on multi-domain network measurement and monitoring has been commercialized as ‘Narada Metrics’.

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Trusted CI Webinar: A Unified Monitoring Approach to Enhancing the Security and Resiliency of Hazard Workflows, Monday January 27th @12pm Central

Sudarsun Kannan and Ram Durairajan are presenting the talk, A Unified Monitoring Approach to Enhancing the Security and Resiliency of Hazard Workflows, on Monday January 27th at 12pm, Central time. (Note the time change)

Please register here.

In this talk, we will first discuss techniques to improve the resiliency of hazard monitoring systems. This includes optimizing machine learning training pipelines for wildfire detection to achieve faster, more accurate results while adapting to real-world constraints such as data variability and network latencies. We will also explore enabling multi-tenancy to maximize resource efficiency by allowing multiple hazard detection workflows to share infrastructure without compromising performance. Furthermore, we will present an in-depth analysis of power and energy consumption for edge devices deployed in remote and resource-constrained environments, emphasizing sustainable and scalable design choices that support long-term operation. Next, we will describe ongoing efforts to enhance the security of critical cyberinfrastructures. This includes developing techniques to prevent denial-of-service attacks that could disrupt hazard monitoring workflows and implementing secure data transmission mechanisms to safeguard information across distributed CI layers.

Speaker Bios: 

Sudarsun Kannan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. His research focuses on operating system design and its intersection with computer architecture, distributed systems, and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. His work has been published in top venues such as ASPLOS, OSDI, and FAST, and he has received best paper awards at SOSP and ASPLOS, along with the Google Research Scholar award. He co-chaired the HotStorage'22 workshop and serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Storage. Before joining Rutgers, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Wisconsin-Madison and graduated with an M.S. and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.

Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer and Data Sciences, and co-directs the Oregon Networking Research Group (ONRG) at the University of Oregon. Ram earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and his B.Tech. in Information Technology from the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Anna University. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in various conferences, journals, and workshops. His research has been recognized with several awards including the NSF CAREER award, NSF CRII award, Ripple faculty fellowship, UO faculty research award, best paper awards from ACM CoNEXT and ACM SIGCOMM GAIA, and has been covered in several fora (NYTimes, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Boston Globe, Gizmodo, Mashable, among others). Recently, his research on Internet topology has been named as "One of the 100 Greatest Innovations," has been cited in FCC's Spectrum Frontiers 2d Report and Order, and has won a number of awards including the "Best of What's New" (in security category) by the Popular Science Magazine.

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Trusted CI Webinar: Privacy Preserving Aggregate Range Queries on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Databases, Monday November 11th @10am Central

Augusta University's Hoda Maleki presenting the talk, Privacy Preserving Aggregate Range Queries on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Databases, on November 18th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

Data-driven collaborations often involve sharing large-scale datasets in cloud environments, where adversaries may exploit server vulnerabilities to access sensitive information. Traditional approaches, such as Trusted Execution Environments, lack the scalability for parallel processing, while techniques like homomorphic encryption incur prohibitive computational overheads. ARMOR addresses these limitations by developing encrypted querying techniques that support a variety of scientific data types and queries, balancing efficiency with privacy. The project’s interdisciplinary team focuses on advancing encryption methods, improving query performance for multidimensional data, and rigorously evaluating security risks and overheads under real-world scenarios.

A recent research under ARMOR is the development of Secure Standard Aggregate Queries (SSAQ), a novel approach for secure aggregation on multidimensional sparse datasets stored on untrusted servers. Aggregation functions like SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX, and STD are essential for scientific data analysis but pose privacy risks when performed on encrypted data. Existing methods using searchable encryption suffer from access pattern and volume leakage and are often limited to one-dimensional settings. SSAQ overcomes these challenges by employing d-dimensional segment trees to precompute responses for all possible query ranges, thus improving the efficiency of secure range queries.

To further reduce leakage, SSAQ integrates Oblivious RAM (ORAM) to conceal data access patterns during query execution. This combination ensures a higher level of security, making SSAQ suitable for complex scientific data scenarios where sensitive information needs to be safeguarded. The approach significantly extends the applicability of searchable encryption techniques, offering a scalable and efficient solution for secure data analytics in cloud environments while minimizing privacy risks.

Speaker Bio: 

Dr. Hoda Maleki is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University, specializing in system security, applied cryptography, and blockchain technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Maleki's research addresses critical security challenges, including IoT security, secure data retrieval in encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving data access in cloud environments. Her work leverages the Universally Composable (UC) security framework to analyze complex systems and employs multi-dimensional searchable encryption to protect massive scientific datasets. With over $1 million in NSF funding, her research advances scalable, efficient cryptographic solutions that meet the security needs of modern data-driven applications.

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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 Webinar: JSON Web Tokens for Science: Hands on Jupyter Notebook tutorial, Monday August 26th @10am Central

SciAuth's Jim Basney and Derek Weitzel are presenting the talk, JSON Web Tokens for Science: Hands on Jupyter Notebook tutorial, on August 26th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

NSF cyberinfrastructure is undergoing a security transformation: a migration from X.509 user certificates to IETF-standard JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). This migration has facilitated a re-thinking of authentication and authorization among cyberinfrastructure providers: enabling federated authentication as a core capability, improving support for attribute, role, and capability-based authorization, and reducing reliance on prior identity-based authorization methods that created security and usability problems. In this webinar, members of the SciAuth project (https://sciauth.org/ - NSF award #2114989) will provide a short, hands-on tutorial for cyberinfrastructure professionals to learn about JWTs, including SciTokens (https://scitokens.org/ - NSF award #1738962). Participants will use Jupyter Notebooks to validate the security of JWTs and experiment with JWT-based authentication and authorization. Participants will gain an understanding of JWT basics suitable for understanding their security and troubleshooting any problems with their use.

Speaker Bios: 

Dr. Jim Basney is a principal research scientist in the cybersecurity group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director and PI of Trusted CI. Jim received his PhD in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Derek Weitzel is a research assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. He has been providing distributed computing solutions to the national cyberinfrastructures since 2009. He is a member of the OSG’s production operations team and leads the operations of the National Research Platform. His current areas of research involve distributed data management for shared and opportunistic storage, secure credential management, and network monitoring and analytics.

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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 Webinar: Automated Building and Deploy Testing — Using Zeek as an example, Monday July 22nd @ 11am Eastern

ESnet's Michael Dopheide is presenting the talk, Automated Building and Deploy Testing — Using Zeek as an example, on July 22nd at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

At ESnet, we pride ourselves on being cutting-edge, even if it causes a few scratches. Every new branch of Zeek is automatically built and tested in Gitlab CI. Then, every night, the latest successful 'master' build is deployed, along with all of our packages and scripts, to a test system via Ansible. As time permits, we roll out the latest build, in production, to over 40 servers.

 

Through this process we've both been able to provide early feedback to the Zeek project about potential bugs and give ourselves an early warning system when changes impact our production plugins and scripts.

Zeek is an open source network security monitoring tool.  This does not focus on the use of Zeek itself, but rather the care and feeding of our installation footprint.

Speaker Bio: Michael “Dop” Dopheide has spent the majority of his career working in the R&E community specializing in systems engineering, security research, incident response, and network intrusion detection. He especially enjoys helping coworkers debug problems at the packet and protocol levels. In addition to his operational security role, Dop helps support the open source Zeek community and volunteers every year to beta test the SANS Holiday Hack challenge.

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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 Webinar: The Transformative Twelve: Taking a Practical, Evidence-Based Approach to Cybersecurity Controls, Monday June 24th @ 11am Eastern

Indiana University's Craig Jackson is presenting the talk, The Transformative Twelve: Taking a Practical, Evidence-Based Approach to Cybersecurity Controls, on June 24th at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

Controls aren’t everything, but they are an important rubber-meets-the-road component of your cybersecurity strategy and program. This webinar will help you will understand the role controls play in a competent cybersecurity program through the lens of the Trusted CI Framework. And, with help cutting through the noise of the many, many controls and control sets in the wild, it will introduce you to the Transformative Twelve, a small, highly prioritized, evidence-based set of cybersecurity controls.

Speaker Bio: Craig Jackson is Deputy Director at the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, where his R&D interests include evidence-based approaches to security, cybersecurity fundamentals, and cybersecurity program development and governance. He leads collaborative work with critical infrastructure partners. His work includes the Trusted CI Framework, the Information Security Practice Principles, and the Cybertrack and USN’s PACT assessment methodologies. Craig’s education background is in law, education, psychology, and philosophy.

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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 Webinar: NSF's 2025 Research Infrastructure Guide: Information Assurance, Monday May 20th @ 11am Eastern

NSF's Michael Corn is presenting the talk, NSF's 2025 Research Infrastructure Guide: Information Assurance, on May 20th at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

NSF's major facilities represent some of the most significant research facilities on the globe. The forthcoming revision to the Research Infrastructure Guide (or RIG) details NSF's guidance on securing these facilities and its expectations for cybersecurity programs at the major facilities. This presentation will explain how we approached shaping this guidance, the unique challenges we faced, and offer a peek at some of the resulting guidance the revised RIG will provide.

Speaker Bio: Michael Corn has been a CISO at four institutions (UIUC, Illinois System, Brandeis University, and most recently UC San Diego). A regular author on a variety of privacy, cybersecurity and identity related topics, he is currently the Cybersecurity Advisor for Research Infrastructure in the Office of the Chief Officer for Research Facilities and additionally provides support to the Office of the Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy within NSF. A recent online presentation on cybersecurity policy can be found at https://bit.ly/3JIpI8w.

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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 Webinar: SPHERE - Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation, Monday April 22nd

Dr. Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson are presenting the talk, SPHERE - Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation, on April 22nd at 12pm Eastern time.

NOTE: This webinar is scheduled one hour later than the usual time.

Please register here.

Cybersecurity and privacy threats increasingly impact our daily lives, our national infrastructures, and our industry. Recent newsworthy attacks targeted nationally important infrastructure, our government, our researchers, and research facilities. The landscape of what needs to be protected and from what threats is rapidly evolving as new technologies are released and threat actors improve their capabilities through experience and close collaboration. Meanwhile, defenders often work in isolation, use private data and facilities, and produce defenses that are quickly outpaced by new threats. To transform cybersecurity and privacy research into a highly integrated, community-wide effort, researchers need a common, rich, representative research infrastructure that meets the needs across all members of the community, and facilitates reproducible science.

To meet these needs, USC Information Sciences Institute and Northeastern University have been funded by the NSF mid-scale research infrastructure program to build Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation (SPHERE). This infrastructure will offer access to an unprecedented variety of hardware, software, and other resources connected by user-configurable network substrate, and protected by a set of security policies uniquely aligned with cybersecurity and privacy research needs. SPHERE will offer six user portals, closely aligned with needs of different user groups. It will support reproducible research through a combination of infrastructure services (easy experiment packaging, sharing and reuse) and community engagement activities (development of realistic experimentation environments and contribution of high-quality research artifacts).

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Jelena Mirkovic is Principal Scientist at USC-ISI and Research Associate Professor at USC. She received her MS and PhD from UCLA, and her BSc from University of Belgrade, Serbia. Jelena's research interests span networking and cybersecurity fields, as well as testbed experimentation. Her current research is focused on authentication, use of machine learning for network attack detection, large-scale dataset labeling for security, and user privacy. She is the lead PI on the SPHERE project.

Mr. David Balenson is Senior Supervising Computer Scientist and Associate Director of the Networking and Cybersecurity Division at USC-ISI. He received his MS and BS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. His current research interests include cybersecurity and privacy for critical infrastructure and cyber-physical systems including automotive and autonomous vehicles, experimentation and test, technology transition, and multidisciplinary research. He is the Community Outreach Director for SPHERE.

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Trusted CI Webinar: Lessons from the ACCORD project, March 18th @11am Eastern

Ron Hutchins and Tho Nguyen are presenting the talk, Lesson from the ACCORD Project, on March 18th at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

The ACCORD cyberinfrastructure project at the University of Virginia (UVA) successfully developed and deployed a community infrastructure providing access to secure research computing resources for users at underserved, minority-serving, and non-PhD-granting institutions. ACCORD's operational model is built around balancing data protection with accessibility. In addition to providing secure research computing resources and services, key outcomes of ACCORD include creation of a set of policies that enable researchers external to UVA to access and use ACCORD. While the ACCORD expedition achieved its technical and operational goals, its broader mission of broadening access to underserved users had limited success. Toward gaining a better understanding of the barriers to researchers accessing ACCORD, our team carried out two community outreach efforts to engage with researchers and computing service leaders to hear their pain points as well as solicit their input for an accessible community infrastructure.

In this talk, we will describe the ACCORD infrastructure and its operational model. We will also discuss insights from our effort to develop policies to balance accessibility with security. And finally, we wil share lessons learned from community outreach efforts to understand institutional and social barriers to access.

Speaker Bios:

Ron Hutchins: In the early 1980’s, Ron worked at the Georgia Institute of Technology to create a networking laboratory in the College of Computing teaching data communications courses there. After moving to the role of Director of Campus Networks in 1991, Ron founded and led the Southern Crossroads network aggregation (SoX) across the Southeast. In 2001 after receiving his PhD in computer networks, he took on the role of Chief Technology Officer for the campus. In August of 2015, Ron moved into the role of Vice President of Information Technology for the University of Virginia, working to build partnerships across the campus. Recently, Ron has moved from VP to research faculty in the Computer Science department at UVA and is participating broadly across networking and research computing in general including work with the State of California building out the broadband fiber network backbone across the state. 

Tho Nguyen is a computer science and policy expert. He served as project manager for the ACCORD effort from 2019-2021, and continues to support the project implementation and growth.  Nguyen is currently a Senior Program Officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  From 2015-2021 Nguyen was on the research staff in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia where he worked on compute-in-memory and developing HPCs for research.  Prior to UVA, he was a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation where he worked primarily on the Cyber Physical Systems program. Nguyen holds a PhD in Systems & Controls (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Washington. 

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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 Webinar Series: Planning for 2024, review of 2023

The 2023 season of the Trusted CI Webinar series has concluded and we are looking forward to the presentations scheduled in the next year. 

We are currently booking the 2024 season.  See our call for presentations to submit a request to present.

In case you missed them, here are the webinars from 2023: 

• January ‘23: Real-Time Operating System and Network Security for Scientific Middleware with Gedare Bloom (NSF Award #2001789) (Video)(Slides) 
• February ‘23: Security Program for the NIH’s Common Fund Data Ecosystem with Rick Wagner (Video)(Slides)
• March ‘23: Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) with Steven Wallace (Video)(Slides)
• April ’23: Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services and Support (ACCESS) with Derek Simmel (NSF Award #2138296) (Video)(Slides)
• May ’23: Deception Awareness and Resilience Training (DART) with Anita Nikolich (NSF Award #2230494) (Video)(Slides)
• June ‘23: SecureMyResearch with Will Drake, Tim Daniel, and Anurag Shankar (Video)(Slides) 
• July ‘23: The Technical Landscape of Ransomware: Threat Models and Defense Models with Barton Miller and Elisa Heymann (Video)(Slides) 
• August ‘23: Leveraging Adaptive Framework for Open Source Data Access Solutions with Jeremy Grieshop (Video)(Slides) 
• September ‘23: Improving the Privacy and Security of Data for Wastewater-based Epidemiology with Ni Trieu (NSF Award #2115075) (Video)(Slides)
• December 4th: Enhancing Integrity and Confidentiality for Secure Distributed Data Sharing (Open Science Chain) with Subhashini Sivagnanam (NSF Award #2114202) (Video)(Slides)
  

Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events. Our complete catalog of webinars and other presentations are available on our YouTube channel. See our call for presentations to submit a request to present. For questions or feedback, email us at webinars@trustedci.org.

Trusted CI Webinar: Open Science Chain, Dec. 4th @11am Eastern

San Diego Supercomputer Center's Subhashini Sivagnanam is presenting the talk, Open Science Chain - Enabling Integrity and Metadata Provenance for Research Artifacts Using Open Science Chain, on December 4th at 11am Eastern time.

Please register here.

The envisioned advantage of sharing research data lies in its potential for reuse. Although many scientific disciplines are embracing data sharing, some face constraints on the data they can share and with whom. It becomes crucial to establish a secure method that efficiently facilitates sharing and verification of data and metadata while upholding privacy restrictions to enable the reuse of scientific data. This presentation highlights our NSF-funded Open Science Chain (OSC) project, accessible at https://www.opensciencechain.org. Developed using blockchain technologies, the OSC project aims to address challenges related to the integrity and provenance of research artifacts. The project establishes an API-based data integrity verification management service for data-driven research platforms and hubs, aiming to minimize data information loss and provide support for managing diverse metadata standards and access controls.

Speaker Bio:

Subhashini Sivagnanam is the manager of the Cyberinfrastructure Services and Solutions (CISS) group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center/ UCSD. Her research interests predominantly lie in distributed computing, cyberinfrastructure development, scientific data management, and reproducible science. She serves as the PI/Co-PI on various NSF/NIH projects related to scientific data integrity and developing cyberinfrastructure software.  Furthermore, she oversees the management of UC San Diego’s campus research cluster known as the Triton Shared Computing Cluster.

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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 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."

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 Webinar: The Technical Landscape of Ransomware: Threat Models and Defense Models, July 17th@11am EST

Members of Trusted CI are presenting the talk, The Technical Landscape of Ransomware:  Threat Models and Defense Models, July 17th at 11am (Eastern).

Please register here.

Ransomware has become a global problem.  Given the reality that ransomware will eventually strike your system, we focus on recovery and not on prevention.  The assumption is that the attacker did enter the system and rendered it inoperative to some extent.

We start by presenting the broad landscape of how ransomware can affect a computer system, suggesting how the IT manager, system designer, and operator might prepare to recover from such an attack.

We show the ways in which ransomware can (and sometimes cannot) attack each component of the systems. For each attack scenario, we describe how the system might be subverted, the ransom act, the impact on operations, difficulty of accomplishing the attack, the cost to recover, the ease of detection of the attack, and frequency in which the attack is found in the wild (if at all). We also describe strategies that could be used to recover from these attacks.

Some of the ransomware scenarios that we describe reflect attacks that are common and well understood. Many of these scenarios have active attacks in the wild. Other scenarios are less common and do not appear to have any active attacks. In many ways, these less common scenarios are the most interesting ones as they pose an opportunity to build defenses ahead of attacks.

Speaker Bios:

Barton Miller is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and the Amar & Belinder Sohi Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a co-PI on the Trusted CI NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, where he leads the software assurance effort and leads the Paradyn Tools project, which is investigating performance and instrumentation technologies for parallel and distributed applications and systems. His research interests include software security, in-depth vulnerability assessment, binary and malicious code analysis and instrumentation, extreme scale systems, and parallel and distributed program measurement and debugging.  In 1988, Miller founded the field of Fuzz random software testing, which is the foundation of many security and software engineering disciplines. In 1992, Miller (working with his then­student Prof. Jeffrey Hollingsworth) founded the field of dynamic binary code instrumentation and coined the term “dynamic instrumentation”. Miller is a Fellow of the ACM and recent recipient of the Jean Claude Laprie Award for dependable computing.

Miller was the chair of the Institute for Defense Analysis Center for Computing Sciences Program Review Committee, member of the U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs Cyber Security Review Committee (POFMR), member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Computing, Communications and Networking Division Review Committee, and has been on the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force (Chicago Area).

Elisa Heymann is a Senior Scientist on TrustedCI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an Associate Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She co-directs the MIST software vulnerability assessment at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

She coordinates in-depth vulnerability assessments for NFS Trusted CI, and was also in charge of the Grid/Cloud security group at the UAB, and participated in two major Grid European Projects:  EGI-InSPIRE and European Middleware Initiative (EMI). Heymann's research interests include software security and resource management for Grid and Cloud environments. Her research is supported by the NSF, Spanish government, the European Commission, and NATO.

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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 Webinar: SecureMyResearch at Indiana University: Effective Cybersecurity for Research, June 26th@11am EST

Members from Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research are presenting the talk, SecureMyResearch at Indiana University: Effective Cybersecurity for Research, June 26th at 11am (Eastern).

Please register here.

The tension between research and cybersecurity has long hampered efforts to secure research. It has kept past institutional cybersecurity effort concentrated on the most sensitive research, but new threats to research integrity and recent federal initiatives such as NSPM-33 are now pointing to a future where securing research holistically is no longer optional. Indiana University launched a pilot in 2020 called SecureMyResearch to expand to the entire campus a research cybersecurity model culminating from years of interaction with biomedical researchers in the School of Medicine. Turning the traditional approach on its head, it aimed to reduce the cybersecurity and compliance burden on the researcher by making cybersecurity invisible. It was laser-focused on the research mission and on accommodating the pace of research. Three years later, the results are showing great promise in breaking the research versus security impasse. Not only have we reached 80 percent penetration on campus, researchers are embracing the service voluntarily and research is being accelerated measurably. In this webinar we will share IU’s research cybersecurity journey and the SecureMyResearch implementation.

https://cacr.iu.edu/projects/SecureMyResearch/index.html

Speaker Bios:

Anurag Shankar provides leadership at CACR in regulatory compliance (HIPAA, FISMA, and DFARS/CMMC), research cybersecurity, and cyber risk management. He developed and leads the SecureMyResearch effort at IU.  He has over three decades of experience conducting research, developing and delivering research computing services, building HIPAA compliant solutions for biomedical researchers, conducting cybersecurity assessments, and providing consulting.  He is a computational astrophysicist by training (Ph.D. 1990, U. of Illinois).

Will Drake is a senior security analyst, CISO at CACR, and the SecureMyResearch lead. Will has worked in various IT roles with Indiana University since 2012, including Operations Supervisor for UITS Data Center Operations and Lead Systems Engineer for the Campus Communications Infrastructure team where he was responsible for ensuring the security of IU’s critical telecommunications infrastructure. Will holds an Associate’s Degree in Computer Information Technology from Ivy Tech and is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in Informatics with a specialization in Legal Informatics from IUPUI’s School of Informatics and Computing.

Tim Daniel is an information security analyst at CACR and a member of the SecureMyResearch team. Previously, Tim worked for a contract research organization carrying out phase 1 and pre-phase 1 clinical trials for veterinary medicine. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology with a focus in chemistry, and an associate's degree in applied biotechnology. After high school, Tim worked for Stone Belt, a nonprofit that provides resources and supports for individuals with disabilities, where he learned patience and listening skills.

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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."