August 2021

October 1st, 2021

Publications

  • Guoxin Sun, Tansu Alpcan, Benjamin Rubinstein, Seyit Camtepe, Strategic mitigation against wireless attacks on autonomous platoons, The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PDKK), 13-17 September 2021. (CORE A)
  • Seyit Camtepe , Jarek Duda, Arash Mahboubi, Paweł Morawiecki , Surya Nepal , Marcin Pawłowski and Josef Pieprzyk, Compcrypt – Lightweight ANS-based Compression and Encryption, in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, doi: 10.1109/TIFS.2021.3096026. (CORE A)
  • David Nguyen had a paper accepted at ACM MM (Core A*)  David D. Nguyen, Surya Nepal, Salil S. Kanhere, Diverse Multimedia Layout Generation with Multi Choice Learning, ACM Multimedia 2021 (CORE Rank: A*)
  • We designed a layout generative model called LayoutMCL that mimics human creative intelligence by learning patterns in visually appealing multimedia layouts.LayoutMCL generates significantly more diverse and realistic layouts in comparison to prior state of the art techniques through quantitative and visual benchmarks. LayoutMCL is based on auto-regressive recurrent and convolutional neural networks that uniquely combines a novel multi-choice learning architecture.  Our generative layout model has the potential to be applied in a wide range of automated and human in-the-loop visual design contexts including:Graphical honeypot generation
    • Procedural content generation for games
    • Reinforcement learning environments
    • Recommendations in graphical editing applications (documents, mobile apps, magazines)
    • Virtual/augmented reality design

    This paper addresses one of the most difficult problems in automating graphical honeypots . To deceive and bait attackers, a group of associated honeypots need to be “realistic” and “similar” yet “diverse” to avoid raising suspicion. These properties can be summarized as: Realisticness: The spatial arrangement and alignment between objects , Similarity to protected assets: Graphical layouts generally follow a barebone template or framework. Diversity: A group of layouts are rarely the same due to the different content LayoutMCL addresses these problems by having the capability to learn realistic patterns in protected assets and is built to generate a diverse range of layouts. Existing approaches to decoy layout design are based on replacement-in-place which lack similarity to protected assets and lack diversity. This approach is vulnerable to simple pattern checking.

Projects

  • DecaaS patent has been submitted. The CSCRC DecaaS project team have filed a patent for their network communication simulation work. Their solution makes use of social network topology, Temporal Point Processes, and language models to simulate events on email servers and other communication platforms like Teams or Slack.
  • New Kick-start project: Global Bionic Optics (GBO) has developed a new technology based on facial recognition to facilitate cryptographic identity authentication for secure business applications.  The technology is relevant to both security and privacy of biometric information. In this project,  we analyse the algorithms and protocols in GBO’s technology to validate the security, privacy, and performance properties.

Staff update

Get to know our most recent staff members:

  • Hajime Suzuki has joined DSS, welcome Hajime.
  • Mohammed Bahutair commenced in August under Autonomous and Application Security team, he will be working for the Threat Hunting project. Mohammed is a postdoctoral fellow at Data61. He holds a bachelor and masters degree in Computer Engineering. His research interests include cyber security, machine learning, Internet of Things, and trust.
  • Alan Colman just joined the group. Alan’s current focus of research is on agent-based autonomic service compositions. He has previously conducted extensive research into adaptive and context-aware distributed software systems with over 150 publications. He is particularly interested in using system-theory to structure and control software architectures. He has applied his research in the industrial and environmental monitoring industries. He is currently also an Adjunct Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology.

Exit:

  • Terry Moschou left Dat61 to join a Start up in Adelaide.

Achievements/ Good news

  • Chamikara Mahawaga Arachchige has been awarded with RMIT research achievement award for the academic year 2020.
  • Welcome to 3 new  DSS Babies. Congratulations to Wei Kang, Dharma Maddu and Muhammad Esgin.
  • DSS group and Pawsey Supercomputing are co-funding 6 students for 3 cyber-security projects this summer

Students

“I am Lihong. I recently finished a research study to find out what is the impact that COVID-19 has on telehealth services and on telehealth users’ opinion of the service. In the work, we performed a systematic analysis on Android and iOS Telehealth app, and we also inspected the telehealth websites’ features. To further understand people’s attitudes towards telehealth services, we invited users to participate in a user study aimed at revealing what impact COVID-19 has on users’ willingness to adopt telehealth services and revealing the gap between the provided telehealth service and its users. From the result, it is glad to see that telehealth apps took immediate action and made a lot of relevant updates to help their users under the pandemic. From the user side, COVID-19 is also a frequent topic extracted from the telehealth app reviews. Apart from the research results, what I learn most from this study is how to design and conduct a large user study properly. Thanks to the support provided by Data61, we are able to conduct a large user study online and received a lot of valuable feedback. I really enjoy the process of analysing their feedback, and I believe I have also improved participant management and communication skills – especially with email – through the large user study. Stay-at-home orders are now in place in Victoria again, apart from my study, I have also unlocked several other skills. I learned how to groom my cat, and take care of the plants. These really help me relax when I get stuck in my research work. I also try to keep fit, even though I am still struggling to have some cardio exercises, but I believe I am on the right track.”

 

 

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

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

 

https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/our-sao-seminars/
Our next guests speakers will be:
  • 23/9/21 Professor Wanlei Zhou, Vice Rector (Academic Affairs), Dean of Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau
  • 28th October 2021, Thursdays 3-4pm AEST, Professor Alana Maurushat, Professor of Cybersecurity and Behaviour, School of Social Sciences, Associate Dean International, School of Computers, Data and Math Sciences

 

  • Data61 and DST Cyber Security Summer School Survey

2021/06/10 – The DST Cyber Security Summer School 2020 will jointly be hosted with the Cyber Defence Next Generation Technology and Science conference at Customs House, Brisbane, on 22 to 24 November 2021. More details to follow. If you have any concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to contact us (cybersecuritysummerschool@csiro.au).

  • SPS Special Session on Cyber Resilience and Antifragility in Complex Distributed Systems (CyRA 2021)

We are organizing a special session (CyRA) as part of the 2021 Self-Protecting Systems (SPS) workshop, which itself is co-hosted with ACSOS 2021. For more information:
https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/cyra2021/

The 2021 Special Session on Cyber Resilience and Antifragility in Complex Distributed Systems (CyRA 2021) will be part of the 3rd International Workshop on Self-Protecting Systems (SPS’21). It will be held in conjunction with the 2nd International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2021), which will be taking a virtual format from 27 September to 1 October 2021.

We invite original research papers that have not been previously published and are not currently under review for publication elsewhere. All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 international experts in the field. Acceptance/rejection will be based on relevance to the workshop topics, technical quality, originality, and presentation (coherent structure, readable figures, etc.). Novel ideas, papers showing promising early results (prior to comprehensive validation), or papers which are more controversial and could trigger discussions, are especially welcome. For such submissions, criteria pertaining to originality and sound argumentation will be given greater weight during the review process.

Accepted papers will be included in the ACSOS’2021 Companion Volume published by IEEE Computer Society Press and made available as a part of the IEEE Digital Library. Papers must thus be in the same format as the conference proceedings and may not be more than 6 pages in length.

Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cyra2021