April 2021

June 11th, 2021

Publications

  • Bedeuro Kim, Alsharif Abuadbba, Yansong Gao, Muhammad Ejaz Ahmed, Hyoungshick Kim, and Surya Nepal, Decamouflage: A Framework to Detect Image-Scaling Attacks on CNN”, the 51st Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) (CORE A) (Accepted). In this paper, we build a detection framework called Decamouflage that defeat a new emerging attack against neural network models named Camouflage Image-scaling attack. The model aim is to ensure the trustworthiness of the Convolutional Neural Network.
  • Shangyu Xie, Meisam Mohammady, Han Wang, Yuan Hong, Lingyu Wang, and Jaideep Vaidya. Generalizing Prex-Preserving Data Outsourcing: Ensuring both Privacy and Utility.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, (TKDE, CORE A ), Accepted , 2020. In this paper, we aim to preserve both privacy (secure against the inference attacks) and accuracy (prefix-aware encoding) of various data types (e.g., geo-locations, market basket data, DNA sequences, numerical data and timestamps) by carefully generating multiple indistiguishable views including all but one fake views.

Projects

AI and Cyber for SME Growth Symposium 22-24/6/21

Delivered in hybrid mode (in-person and online) between Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (and other parts of Australia collaboratively connected via a remote link).

The Symposium invites a variety of SMEs, R&D organisations and academic institutions to present, brainstorm, workshop and connect through various topics in the AI and Cyber domains. This will enable Australian SMEs to better understand how those technologies and digital innovations could be used and can equip them to grow within a digitally enabled environment. We are aiming to bring about greater awareness of SME engagement in the AI and cyber space to create a collaborative Australian network.

For more information: http://ai-cyber.matters.today/

Organising Committee

  • Tomasz Bednarz (CSIRO’s, Simulation & Modelling CCC Leader)
  • Marthie Grobler (CSIRO’s Team Leader)
  • Roshan Dodanwela (CSIRO’s Engineering CCC Leader)
  • Andreas Duenser (CSIRO’s User Experience & Social Science CCC Leader)
  • Liming Zhu (CSIRO’s Research Director)
  • Scott Brown (UNSW)
  • Mashhuda Glencross (UQ)

Data61 and DST Cyber Security Summer School Survey

Over a year has passed since we had to postpone the Data61 & DST Cyber Security Summer School 2020  and The Cyber Defence Next Generation Technology and Science Conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We would again like to thank you for your patience and understanding with taking such measures.

Please take a couple of minutes to fill out this short survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DBGD8QB) in order to help us with planning and logistics for our next event. Note that your responses are non-binding — we do not expect you to commit to attending the events with any certainty but are interested in your thoughts on when would be the preferred time for hosting the event, as well as the format thereof.

New starters:

Get to know two of our most recent staff members:

Emma Xu

Emma is now a research fellow, dedicating to AI models applicable to social webs. It is quite exciting to translate mathematical formulations to computational algorithms. The team is keen to find solutions for certain groups of online users considering fast-changing web scenarios. In complex connected social webs, influential factors to these users, especially in topological structures, will be identified and predicted for security warning. She finds the similarities between her research projects and her off-work hobbies – Lego and knitting. They all require fundamental techniques, innovative strategies and infinite patience to improve them. Her 6-year-old pet rabbit brings a lot of joys and makes her value every second in life.

Meisam Mohammady

I am an active Research Scientist in CSIRO DATA61. Prior to that I have been an active member of the NSERC/Ericsson Senior Industrial Research Chair (IRC) research program at Concordia University, as well as the Data Privacy and Security Lab in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT, USA). My Ph.D. is from CS department of Concordia Cordia University, MSc from EE department of Ecole Polytechnique Montreal, and BS from EE Sharif University of Technology. I have accumulated rich and valuable experiences through frequent interactions with industrial experts, preparing and delivering industrial presentations and demos, drafting patents, and contributing to the development of industry-related research proposals, etc.  I am honoured to receive the “Distinguished PhD Dissertation Awards” among all Engineering and Natural Science PhD dissertations for my Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Novel Approaches to Preserving Utility in Privacy Enhanced Technologies”.

Significant amount of individual information is being collected and analyzed today through a wide variety of applications across different industries. While pursuing better utility by discovering knowledge from the data, individual’s privacy may be compromised: corporate networks monitor their online behaviour, advertising companies collect and share their private information, and cybercriminals cause financial damages through security breaches. Addressing this issue, the data typically goes under certain anonymization techniques. Unfortunately, most such techniques either are vulnerable to adversaries with prior knowledge, or require heavy data sanitization which may result in a significant loss of data utility. I am interested in building accurate and privacy-preserving tools for Internet communications. Such tools can be deployed not only by dissidents and whistleblowers, but also by ordinary Internet users on a daily basis. I combine the development of practical systems with rigorous theoretical analysis, and incorporate techniques from various disciplines such as computer networking, cryptography, and statistical analysis.

Media:

Hamza Sellak, from the Human Centric team features in ‘Careers with STEM‘ Magazine, page 22 https://issuu.com/refractionmedia/docs/cws_maths_data_2021

Achievements/ Good news

Muhammed Esgin received the 2020 Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for Thesis Excellence Award from Monash University (in recognition of my PhD thesis). This award is among the highest academic honours the University bestows and marks the recipients as researchers of the highest order. Congratulations Muhammed!

Marthie Grobler presented a paper at USEC2021 (Workshop on Usable Security).

Our work on the perception of privacy-preserving technologies in Australian food supply chains is published in USEC21 workshop. Although we have listed several findings from our study, one of the important take home message is that “distribution of equity is important to improve data sharing in food supply chains”. If you are interested in improving efficiencies of a supply chain and make it work, you might also need to think about not only whats, but also how the gain would be distributed across all the actors in the supply chain. The work was a collaboration across security and social science teams in Data61 including Alexander Krumpholz, Marthie Grobler, Raj Gaire, Claire Mason, Shanae Burns.

“Raising Trust in the Food Supply Chain”

http://www.usablesecurity.net/USEC/usec21/papers/usec2021_Alexander_Krumpholz.pdf

Students

Let’s meet some of our students:

Viet Vo is a final-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Software and CyberSecurity, Monash University. His research interests are in the area of applied cryptography and data privacy, cloud security, and network security. Viet’s aim is to enhance the efficiency and security/privacy of real-world systems.

Events:

  • The Human Centric AI Seminars Series

The Human Centric Security team are running a new monthly series “The Human Centric AI Seminars” that will focus on various research topics in human centered AI.
For more info contact: Kristen Moore and Tina Wu
Free access to anyone interested in Humans and AI

Please join us for our next Human Centric AI Seminar on Wednesday 12 May 2021 at 1-1.50pm AEST. Our speaker is Professor Julien Epps from UNSW and Data61, CSIRO. More info on our webpage https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/the-human-centric-ai-seminars-series/

Title: Understanding human tasks from wearable sensor signals

  • Join us for our monthly SAO seminars in collaboration with the Cyber Security CRC.

For more information or to view past events: https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/our-sao-seminars/

Our next seminar:

Speaker: Professor Jianying Zhou, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore.

Date and Time: 26th May, 3 – 4 PM AEST (1 – 2 PM SGT).

Title: Securing Critical Infrastructure: Challenges and Solutions

DSS staff members and their pets:

This month we wanted to pay tribute to all the staff members’ pets who helped them committing to their work during various lock-downs.

Below you will see Raj and his fish, Marthie’s Australian Walking Stick insect Stokkies, Andrew and his dog Calvin, Emma’s bunny, Regine’s cat Lily, Alison’s cat Hugo.

Thanks to all of them