CSAW 21, the world’s most comprehensive student-run cybersecurity event returns virtually for five days starting November 10. This year’s edition—the 18th since the event began—will feature competitions, panel discussions, a career fair, and multiple opportunities to hear about leading edge technologies for protecting people, systems, and data in the cyber environment.
Here is a quick preview of what’s new and exciting for CSAW 21.
Timely Topics Addressed in CSAW Talks
Featured speakers confirmed to date for the event include Dr. Martin Otto, head of the Cybersecurity Research Group for Siemens Technology, who will deliver the keynote address, and Dr. Johann Knechtel, a research scientist with the Design for Excellence Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. Knechtel’s talk will describe the challenging supply chain security issues in the design and production of integrated circuits. In particular, he will address how proactively hardening the IC design can hinder adversarial activities that may occur later on in the supply chain.
Several other NYU faculty and students will also share insights on timely cybersecurity issues during the opening day of the conference. Dr. Siddharth Garg, an Institute Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU Tandon, will moderate a panel on Security Challenges in 5G Wireless and Beyond. Joining him will be Dr. Sundeep Rangan, the associate director of NYU Wireless. The 5G session will be followed by a presentation about the growing practice of utilizing artificial intelligence-based systems to automatically generate computer code. Dr. Hammond Pearce, a post-doctoral research associate with the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, will be sharing insights from a study that found code prepared using the GitHub Copilot programming assistant is, at best, buggy, and at worst, potentially vulnerable to attack. After creating 89 potential scenarios and having CoPilot output 1,692 programs Pearce and his colleagues found that about 40 percent included bugs or design flaws that could be exploited by an attacker.
Closing out the first day of the competition will be the presentation of this year’s Cyber Journalism Award. Dina Temple-Raston will be honored for her National Public Radio feature entitled A ‘worst nightmare’ cyberattack: The untold story of the SolarWinds hack.
International perspectives readily accessible
A highlight of CSAW’s virtual format is the ability to engage in presentations from other CSAW global regions. Throughout the five days of the event, there will be ample opportunities to watch finals and awards ceremonies in real-time from NYU Abu Dhabi, Grenoble INP – Esisar, and the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur.
You can see the full line-up of CSAW 21 events at https://www.csaw.io/agenda. Registration is free and one registration covers all five days. Go to https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/j6zqEM to register.
CSAW 21 is presented by the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, and is sponsored by Siemens, DTCC, the National Science Foundation, Facebook, Trail of Bits, Carnegie Mellon University Information Networking Institute, SecurityScorecard, and Amazon Web Service. The Capture the Flag Competition is supported through challenge contributions from RET2 Systems, Vector 35, Dice Gang, Capsule 8, Trail of Bits, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Perfect Blue, RangeForce, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, F-Secure, Margin Research, Sophos, Kroll LLC, and Microsoft.