April/May 2022

June 24th, 2022

Publications / Papers accepted:

  • The publication involved in our CRP project is now awarded the Most Influential IJCAI Papers in 2020. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) presents only 15 most influential papers for each year. Our paper is ranked the 4th of 2020. Fanzhen Liu, Shan Xue, Jia Wu, Chuan Zhou, Wenbin Hu, Cecile Paris, Surya Nepal, Jian Yang, and Philip S. Yu. “Deep learning for community detection: Progress, challenges and opportunities.”, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI2020), Pages 4981-4987. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/693
  • How does Visualisation Help App Practitioners Analyse Android Apps?, Tang, Lihong; Wu, Tingmin; Chen, Xiao; Wen, Sheng; Li, Li; Xia, Xin; Grobler, Marthie; Xiang, Yang, accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) In this paper, we design and implement a visualisation framework called VisualDroid. It contains the visualisation components based on visualised control graph. VisualDroid is to be applied as a visualisation platform to improve the effectiveness and users’ security awareness in Android APK behaviour analysis.
  •    Zhi Zhang, Yueqiang Cheng, Minghua Wang, Wei He, Wenhao Wang, Surya Nepal, Yansong Gao, Kang Li, Zhe Wang, and Chenggang Wu, “SoftTRR: Protect Page Tables against Rowhammer Attacks using Software-only Target Row Refresh”. This paper has been accepted by 2022 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC ’22) [A top operating-system conference, CORE A]. In this paper, we introduce a new software-only rowhammer defense to defend against attacks on page tables. Compared to prior works, our proposed defense is an effective and practical software-only mitigation scheme.
  • Mariya Shmalko, Sharif Abuadbba, Raj Gaire, Tingmin Wu, Hye-Young Paik, Surya Nepal, “Profiler: Distributed Model to Detect Phishing”, 2022 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) (CORE A).

Summary: in this work we propose Profiler which is a distributed phishing risk assessment tool that mitigates the issue of concept drifting where attackers develop adversarial attacks against anti-phishing ML defence. Unlike the pure ML-based approach, Profiler does not require large data sets to be effective and our evaluations on real-world datasets show that it can be used in conjunction with ML algorithms to mitigate the impact of concept drifts.

Papers published

Projects

THz Com project: Final lab demonstration in June 2022.The project led to the development of a new 4-channel intermediate frequency (IF) plus digital module which achieves a data rate of 20 Gbps and can tolerate a Doppler frequency offset of up to 200 MHz, showing the significant engineering practice and expertise of electronics engineering that our group is unique aboutThis new module has potential applications in space communications, edge computing, tactic communications, and many other areas where high-speed communications are critical.There could be a follow up project under the new Department of Home Affair projects as they expressed interest in THz comm for 6G.  We are currently discussing. For more information https://research.csiro.au/cybernetics/project-a-new-demonstrator-of-20gbps-digital-and-if-transceiver/

Defence Innovation Hub Data61 Electronic Support Measure Kits project, fully funded by Defence Innovation Hub, Hajime Suzuki as the project leader, we have successfully submitted the Deliverable 3, Concept of Operations Document, worth Au$100k milestone.  This project delivers to the Defence Innovation Hub under Artificial Intelligence Applications in Defence challenge a technology demonstrator to realise Electronic Support Measure Kit (portable and distributed electromagnetic wave sensor) that utilises Data61 in-house developed in-coming RF signal direction finding algorithms and machine learning RF signal identification and classification algorithms to provide RF-derived survey information for Common Operating Picture (COP) application.  The project supports Defence needs by utilising Data61 intellectual properties.

Quantum ML for Cyber project, project approved under Quantum Technologies Future Science Platform, Hajime Suzuki, Seyit Camtepe, Chandra Thapa, and Usman Muhammad, preparing for 1 July 2022 start, postdoc position has been advertised, aiming to develop quantum and quantum-inspired machine learning algorithms to enhance cyber security.  This project further builds Data61 capability in Quantum Technologies in particular in Cyber Security domain.

DST Group Distributed Transmit Beamforming project, Hajime Suzuki as the project leader, we have successfully completed the final milestone of the technology field trial in Adelaide achieving simultaneously over 1 Mbps data rate, 80 km/h vehicle speed, and 20 km range using Defence frequency (using four distributed 10 W transmitters, instead of one 160 W transmitter which would have implementation difficulties).  This project is closing and delivered Technologies to Defence as required.

Media Release:

We have a media release on the project “Email Summarisation to Assist Users in Phishing Identification” https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-inexperienced-users-phishing-emails.html

Networking

The Marsfield team met with Professor Ganna Pogrebna, in the Face 2 Face seminar, on the 27/4/22. We aim to establish a strategic collaboration with her as she is an expert in human centric and cybersecurity. We started draft proposals and explore opportunities for Data61 scholarship, CSCRC project, next generation graduation program and DSTG  projects as she has strong connections in that space.

The Docklands team met with A/Professor Olya Ohrimenko, in a Face 2 Face seminar, on 28/4/22. A/Prof Ohrimenko is a lecturer at University of Melbourne, and presented as part of the SAO seminar series (external stream). Her talk was focused on security and privacy for machine learning. After the in-person meeting, some of the Marsfield-staff joined online to have discussions with her on future collaboration.

Good news

Zhi Zhang has been invited to serve as a Program Committee Member of ASIACCS 2023 (CORE A), a premier conference in computer security.

Staff Update

Welcome to Shahroz!

Shahroz Tariq joined our group as a CERC Postdoctoral Fellow and relocated his family from Seoul. He will be working on the Collaborative Intelligence (CINTEL) project. Shahroz Tariq is a postdoctoral research fellow at Data61. He received his B.S. in Computer Science with high distinction from the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST-NUCES), Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2014, and his M.S. in Computer Science with high distinction from the Sangmyung University, Cheonan, South Korea in 2017. He was a Ph.D. research assistant at Stony Brook University and SUNY Korea from 2017 to 2019. He received his Ph.D. from Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea, in 2022, working on continual learning, deepfake, and anomaly detection.

 

Welcome to Usman!

Dr Muhammad Usman is a Senior Lecturer leading Quanics Group and IBM Q Hub Academic at the University of Melbourne Australia. He is an expert in quantum computing and related technologies with more than a decade long research experience in the areas of quantum hardware design, quantum sensing, quantum algorithms and quantum device benchmarking. His work as part of the ARC funded Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology has led to several cutting-edge studies in advancing Australia’s national efforts to build a large-scale quantum computer. Since 2018, Dr Usman has also been working as an IBM Q Hub Academic at the University of Melbourne, where the focus of his research has been benchmarking quantum simulations and algorithms on near-term quantum devices. He has contributed to establishing a new quantum education program at the University of Melbourne. Dr Usman received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, Indiana USA in 2010. He has authored over 65 peer-reviewed publications and has been invited in several invited talks. Dr Usman is a recipient of several awards including 2020 Finalist of Rising Star in Computational Material Science from Elsevier and 2019 Best Researcher Award at the University of Melbourne. He has received prestigious research fellowships including USA Fulbright Fellowship in 2005 and German DAAD Fellowship in 2010. He is an Executive Board Member of the Institute of Physics journal Nano Futures. Further information about his work can be found at his personal webpage: http://www.quantumelectronics.org/

Join us

New PDF position (CERC Fellow in Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography)

External: https://jobs.csiro.au/job-invite/83511/

LinkedIn: CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography | CSIRO | LinkedIn

 Students Update

Meet some of our new students:

Welcome to Mathew Duong

Mathew is a master’s student at the University of Adelaide. He received his bachelor’s degree in software engineering at the University of Adelaide in 2021. His research is centered in cyber security specially looking into vulnerability analysis using automated testing techniques.

Welcome to Nuwan Kaluarachchi from RMIT.

Nuwan Kaluarachchi is an HDR candidate in the Mathematical Sciences of the School of Science at RMIT University. His research focuses on applying behavioural biometrics for continuous authentication on mobile and desktop devices using deep learning algorithms and studying the attacks on the authentication process.

Regular Events

  • SAO seminars in collaboration with the Cyber Security CRC

https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/our-sao-seminars/

 

  • Human Centric seminars

https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/the-human-centric-ai-seminars-series/