In September of 2022, New York University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced a historic partnership that would, among other things, “lay the groundwork for a joint presence in New York City—KAIST’s first campus in the United States.” On February 23 and 24, representatives from both institutions gathered at 370...
NYU Tandon released a unique marketing campaign at the end of last year to promote the groundbreaking work of its engineering and science faculty. With a cheeky nod to several superhero franchises, it introduced 10 faculty members from a number of disciplines, along with Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević, as “Agents of Optimism.” The initial trailer...
Uptane, a project of the Secure Systems Laboratory at NYU Tandon, invites everyone to “A Conversation on End-to-End Secure Automotive Software Updates.” This free online Zoom conference will run from 9 to 11 a.m. EDT on March 31. Specific topics addressed at the conference will include an overview of software supply chain security issues, particularly...
When contemplating where hackers will strike, perhaps the last target to come to mind would be the box office of an established cultural institution like New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. Yet, on December 7, attackers did just that. The hack prevented ticket sales, forcing its staff to revert to hand-printed tickets that sold for a...
In an effort to better understand how advertisers access and use consumers’ personal information to generate online targeted ads, the National Science Foundation is funding a multi-institutional team that includes NYU Tandon’s Dr. Damon McCoy as co-principal investigator. Under the $1.2 million grant, McCoy and his colleagues are charged with developing strategies to make targeted...
In a test of how well social media outlets enforce their policies about harmful content in advertising, Facebook clearly fell short during the US midterm elections. A study conducted by Global Witness and NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) found that Facebook either failed to detect, or just ignored, death threats against election workers contained in a...
Want the benefit of an AI-assisted code generation program like GitHub Copilot, but don’t want to be tethered to the Microsoft universe? Dr. Brendan Dolan-Gavitt has developed an alternative. In the summer of 2022, the assistant professor of computer science and engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering introduced the cheekily-named FauxPilot. The primary goal...
Software programs can often be brought down by “some seemingly insignificant component, without which it fails.” Thus writes David Geer in a commissioned article in Communications of the ACM that looks at “how software stays so fragile despite industry efforts to stabilize it.” The article, published in October, examines “tendencies and trends” that “inflate coding errors”...
On October 10, 2022, websites at a number of airports around the U.S. simultaneously suffered denial-of-service attacks at the hands of the Russian “hacktivist” group Killnet. Major airports, such as LaGuardia, Orlando International, LAX, O’Hare and Midway, and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, saw their websites go down, though operations were not directly impacted. In an interview broadcast...
Maybe AI is A-OK after all? A year after his initial study raised serious concerns about potentially buggy code being written by AI-assisted programs, Dr. Brendan Dolan-Gavitt now reports the risk differential between source code written by human programmers and code written with the help of large language models (LLMs) may not be “statistically significant.” Dolan-Gavitt,...