Though the bottom line of his company may have been the motivating force behind Apple CEO Tim Cook’s testimony in court on May 21, his voiced concerns about the risks of allowing third-party applications on the iPhone are not unfounded. Testifying in an antitrust suit brought against Apple by game developer Epic Games, Cook described...
Author: Lois Anne DeLong (Lois Anne DeLong)
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Introducing the 2021 CCS Ph.D.s
Five doctoral candidates affiliated with the NYU Center for Cybersecurity were officially declared graduates at Commencement Services on May 19. Let’s congratulate the Center’s newly minted doctors as they head off to positions in both industry and academia. Periwinkle Doerfler (Advisor: Dr. Damon McCoy) Ph.D., Computer Science Periwinkle successfully defended her dissertation on “’Adversarial ‘Intended’ Usage...
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CCS Ph.D. graduate Doerfler featured in 2021 “Commencement Profile”
Dr. Periwinkle Doerfler from the Computer Science and Engineering department was one of 18 NYU Tandon graduates from all levels featured in a series of “2021 Commencement Profiles” shared on the school’s website and featured in the ceremony’s program. In the profile, Doerfler, one of five CCS-affiliated doctoral candidates to be awarded a Ph.D. at...
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Tandon’s Dvorkin points out security “gap” revealed by Colonial Pipeline attack
The critical lesson of the recent Colonial Pipeline incident is less about what was exploited and more about the lack of options operators had once the attack was known. A May 13 article on Cybersecurity Dive noted that, despite the fact that the hack did not affect the operations side, the decision to shutdown all...
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Tandon research projects tap emerging encryption strategies to better secure data
The early months of 2021 have been a productive period for Dr. Brandon Reagen, an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and a member of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity (CCS). His recent initiatives to enhance data security have included two different projects utilizing an increasingly popular form of encryption called fully homomorphic encryption...
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Amoroso and Milch of CCS argue against FBI “Hack to Patch” operation
Are law enforcement officials justified in hacking thousands of computers if the end result is a patch that corrects a critical vulnerability? In an editorial in JustSecurity posted on April 30, two faculty members from NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity (CCS) argue that, in a recent case when the FBI engaged in a “hack to patch,”...
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A.I. can write code, but should it?
Writing code can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, so it is not surprising that research is underway to automate the process using artificial intelligence (A.I.). But, while machine-based code can make things easier, it also opens the possibility of perpetuating bugs and other flaws that were never fixed in the original source code. As...
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Cappos describes the evolution of cyber attackers in Radio Spectrum interview
Anyone who might underestimate the skills and resources of today’s cyber attackers does so at their own risk. That was one of the takeaways from a recent appearance on IEEE Radio Spectrum by Dr. Justin Cappos, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Describing malware as, “something that...
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Tandon research team reveals GANs cannot completely protect identity
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are machine-learning (ML) systems used to “scrub” images of any traces of personal identity. But, after exploring the machine-learning frameworks behind these tools, a team of researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering suggest that these scrubbed images leave a lot of “residue” behind. The...
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Political Ad Initiative Broadens its Focus, Changes its Name
For the past few years, NYU Tandon Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Dr. Damon McCoy and Ph.D. candidate Laura Edelson have been peering behind the curtain of social media to reveal the sources behind political ads and content, and to use data analysis to expose possible disinformation campaigns. Through the Online Political Advertising...