Impact

A few recent examples of CCS projects making a difference. For more, follow our news coverage here:

  • The Cybersecurity for Democracy initiative, lead by Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Damon McCoy and Ph.D. candidate Laura Edelson, has expanded its scope beyond  identifying the roots of political advertising. As stated on the program’s website, the Center is “a research-based, nonpartisan, and independent effort to expose online threats to our social fabric – and recommend how to counter them.” Over the past year, the Center has published several influential studies on social media policy, and Edelson has become a “go-to” commentator on issues related to disinformation campaigns and their influence on elections, public opinion, and government policy.
  • “Deep fakes,” or photos that have been digitally manipulated, are becoming increasingly harder to detect. As a defensive strategy against this threat, CCS cofounder Nasir Memon, along with Paweł Korus, a research assistant professor in the NYU Tandon Department of Computer Science,  introduced a a neural network trained to jointly optimize for high-fidelity photo rendering and reliable provenance analysis to replace the traditional photo development pipeline in a camera. Recently, Memon and Korus created an open source library to support modeling and optimization of photo acquisition and distribution pipelines at https://github.com/pkorus/neural-imaging.
  • Uptane is a framework that protects software delivered over-the-air to the computerized units of automobiles. It can thwart attacks from malicious actors who can compromise servers and networks used to sign and deliver updates.  Uptane  released V.2.0.0 of its Standard for Design and  Implementation in March 2022 and published its first whitepaper in June 2021.
  • “The challenges in securing the supply chain of any project in any industry can be traced to a few common problems: multiple production steps involving numerous suppliers and manufacturers, a lack of shared standards for specifying materials, and little or no verification of what was done at each step and by whom.” These words open a special research focus in the most recent issue of CyberByte, the newsletter of the Center for Cybersecurity. Read about how CCS researchers are contributing to the development of supply chain protection practices for hardware and software.