Figure Caption: An illustration of two countermeasures to address material-level attacks on microfluidic biochips. On the left, an ML-based material authentication scheme where a simple punch test (F), coupled with a load cell, can authenticate whether the material’s composition is correct. On the right, a laser shining UV light (λ) on the dye-doped microvalve, provides...
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay Are important issues regarding the use of artificial intelligence tools getting lost in a swirl of speculation about their emerging “personalities”? A recent article in Popular Science suggests that “humanizing” generative AI chatbots could be distracting programmers and designers “from more serious and immediate dangers of the developing technology.”...
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 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,...
On September 7, the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced a new five-year partnership to advance the work of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity. A primary goal of the partnership is to expand the concept of resiliency in CCS research and educational offerings. According to an announcement published...
What does it take to win a hardware security competition? The top three winners from the HACK@DAC competition, including two Ph.D. candidates from NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity, provided some insights on the topic in a recent interview for the podcast “What That Means with Camille,” part of Intel’s Cyber Security Inside series. Baleegh Ahmad and...