May – June 2021

July 14th, 2021

Publications

  • Muhammed Esgin has a paper accepted at CRYPTO 2021 conference (CORE rank A*); Title: DualRing: Generic Construction of Ring Signatures with Efficient Instantiations; Authors: Tsz Hon Yuen (The University of Hong Kong), Muhammed F. Esgin (Monash University and CSIRO’s Data61, Australia), Joseph K. Liu (Monash University, Australia), Man Ho Au (The University of Hong Kong), Zhimin Ding (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Seyit Camtepe, Jarek Duda, Arash Mahboubi, Paweł Morawiecki, Surya Nepal, Marcin Pawłowski and Josef Pieprzyk, Compcrypt — Lightweight ANS-based Compression and Encryption, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, accepted May 18, 2021, The title says it all. Asymmetric numeral system (ANS) is a very fast and close to optimal compression algorithm invented by Jarek Duda. It is now being widely used in the IT industry (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.). ANS compression in IoT is used without any security. The work addresses this problem. The task in hand is to incorporate a simple encryption with minimal cryptographic tools. This tool is a randomness obtained from PRBG. The paper suggests three solutions: an ANS with state jumps, a double ANS with random transitions and finally an ANS with state evolution. Security and efficiency evaluations are given in the paper.
  • Jillian Ryan, Hamza Sellak, Emily Brindal, “Life is unrecognisable”: Sentiment analysis of COVID-19 impacts on a sample of Australian adults. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Medical Internet Research: Public Health and Surveillance.
  • Xiaogang Zhu has a paper accepted at ACM CCS 2021 conference (CORE rank A*); Title: Regression Greybox Fuzzing; Authors: Xiaogang Zhu, Marcel Boehme.  Most bugs discovered by fuzzing are regression bugs, which are the ones that are introduced due to updates of applications. We design a fuzzing algorithm to steer computing resources towards code regions that are changed more recently or frequently.
  • Xiaotao Feng has a paper accepted at ACM CCS 2021 conference (CORE rank A*); Title: SNIPUZZ: Black-box Fuzzing of IoT Firmware via Message Snippet Inference; Authors: Xiaotao Feng, Ruoxi Sun, Xiaogang Zhu, Minhui Xue, Sheng Wen, Dongxi Liu, Surya Nepal, Yang Xiang. The messages responded from IoT devices imply the code coverage of firmware. By categorising the responses, we are able to test IoT devices more efficiently.
  • Galbraith S, Liu D, Nepal S, Ruj S, Pieprzyk J, Liu J, Steinfeld R, Sakzad A, Esgin M, Kuchta V, Susilo W, Plantard T & Dung D, “The quantum threat to cybersecurity: Looking through the prism of post-quantum cryptography”.  https://data61.csiro.au/en/Our-Research/Our-Work/The-quantum-secure-cryptography-of-tomorrow. The white paper explores the challenges and opportunities for information security as a result of the growth of quantum computing.

Achievements/ Good news

Congratulations to our Program awards winners

May 2021 SCS Awards

  • Customer 1st: DecaaS Team: Kristen Moore, Cody Christopher, Surya Nepal
  • Engineering and Technology: Seung Jang
  • Collaboration: Alsharif Abuadbba

Students

Data61 PhD scholarships now open  https://jobs.csiro.au/job/Melbourne%2C-VIC-Data61-PhD-Scholarships/753995500/

Let’s meet one of our new students:

Welcome Erik Buchholz: My name is Erik Buchholz, and I am commencing my PhD project at UNSW Sydney in collaboration with the CSCRC. For me, privacy plays a crucial role to feel safe in today’s more and more interconnected digital world. Therefore, I have focused on privacy-enhancing technologies ever since my bachelor’s degree at RWTH Aachen in Germany. During my bachelor’s and master’s theses, I prototyped a platform for user-controlled data sharing and a platform for the privacy-preserving exchange of process parameters in industrial settings, respectively. With my PhD project, I want to find new ways for privacy-preserving data sharing for research purposes without significantly impairing utility and hindering research progress. 
Originally, I am from Wolfsburg in Germany, but I already lived in this beautiful country for one year, as I was doing an exchange year in Sydney during my master’s degree. Since then, I have dreamed of coming back, and I am super excited to get the opportunity to perform my research as part of the Australian CSCRC. When I am not at the office, I love to be outdoors, training for a marathon, doing CrossFit, or going for a hike with friends. 

Events:

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

Delivered in hybrid mode (in-person and online) between Sydney, Melbourne (only online) 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: https://wp.csiro.au/ai-cyber/

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)
  • Regine Richelle (CSIRO’s Project Manager)
  • 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

If you have missed our previous seminar, recording available here: https://csiro.webex.com/recordingservice/sites/csiro/recording/7aa87a10aafd1039a55f005056ba4c61/playback

June 9, 13.00 AEST

Title: From perception to decision: what could human behaviours tell

Speaker: Dr Kun Yu (UTS)

  • 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 June seminars:

  1. Threat Hunting in Industrial Control Systems
  1. Using Design Thinking to Fuse Behavioural Science with Cyber Deception
  • 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).

The group joined online events

  • 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