Newsfeed May, June and July 2023

November 20th, 2023

Published papers

  • Computer, Speech and Language; Moore, Kristen, Zhong, Shenjun, He, Zhen, Rudolf, Torsten, Fisher, Nils, Victor, Brandon and Jindal, Neha; ‘A comprehensive solution to retrieval-based chatbot construction’; This paper presents a comprehensive solution to the development of a retrieval-based chatbot  starting from an un-labelled chat corpus through to deployment in a corporate environment; (ePublish EP2021-0549).
  • Anton Uzunov, Quoc Bao Vo, Hoa Khanh Dam, Charles Harold, Mohan Baruwal Chhetri, Alan Colman and Saad Hashmi, “Adaptivity & Antifragility“. Book Chapter in: Kott, A. (eds) Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Defense Agent (AICA). Advances in Information Security, vol 87. Springer, Cham. (ePublish EP2022-2360). This work outlines how adaptivity and antifragility can be achieved in Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Defense Agent (AICA) systems through self-management and self-improvement.  
  • Yifeng Zheng, Shuangqing Xu, Songlei Wang, Yansong Gao, Zhongyun Hua. “Privet: A Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning Service for Gradient Boosted Decision Tables“. This paper designs, implements, and evaluates Privet, the first system framework enabling privacy-preserving VFL service for gradient boosted decision tables. Published at IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE TSC (CORE A*), (ePublish EP2023-2146)
  • Xiao Liu, Kelly Blincoe, Mohan Baruwal Chhetri, John Grundy, “Editorial: Human-centric software engineering – Approaches, technologies, and applications“. This is an editorial for a Special Issue with Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software (CORE A) (ePublish EP2023-2376)

Publications accepted

  • Tooba Aamir, Mohan Baruwal Chhetri, M.A.P. Chamikara, and Marthie Grobler. “Government Mobile Apps: Analysing Citizen Feedback via App Reviews”, submitted to ASE 2023 (CORE A*). This paper highlights and investigates the significant impact of leveraging mobile app reviews as a cost-effective and continuous source of citizen feedback on government digital services, identifying issues and user satisfaction factors that align with the government’s digital transformation strategy. We use the Australian Government mobile apps as a case-study to evaluate the efficacy of this approach.
  • Nazatul Haque Sultan, Vijay Varadharajan, Saurab Dulal, Seyit Camtepe, and Surya Nepal, “NDN-RBE: An Accountable Privacy-Aware Access Control Framework for NDN”, The Computer Journal, Oxford University Press (one of the oldest computer science research journal). This paper proposes a novel access control scheme referred to as Role-Based Encryption, which uses broadcast encryption and role hierarchy mechanisms to achieve secure data access control in Named Data Networking (NDN).
  • Nan Wang, Sid Chi-Kin Chau and Dongxi Liu. “SwiftRange: A Short and Efficient Zero-Knowledge Range Argument For Confidential Transactions and More”, submitted to IEEE S&P 2024 (CORE A*). This paper proposes a new type of logarithmic-sized zero-knowledge range argument, which can serve as a robust alternative to range proofs in confidential transactions on blockchain systems.

Projects

CSCRC CL@BEL’s first train-the-trainer session was hosted with industry project partners and members of the public on 17 July 2023. The team also hosted a conference game play event with the new Corporates Compromised™ branded printed game (Marthie Grobler).

The Human-Centric Security team, along with our collaborators at the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre and Edith Cowen University ran an action-packed cybersecurity tabletop exercise with executives attending the CISO Melbourne event on 19 July 2023. To learn more about Corporates Compromised™ please contact humancentricsecurity@csiro.au please contact humancentricsecurity@csiro.au

Conferences and Events

  • CSIRO’Data61 proudly sponsored AsiaCCS’23 conference, top ranked security venue in the world and Asia pacific, hosted in Melbourne Australia 10-14 July 2023. Our group was part of the organisation committee including Surya Nepal being pc-chair, Seyit Camtepe being publication chair, Sharif Abuadbba being the web chair. The organisation committee also has our partners from the Australian universities such as Monash, Swinburne, UQ and UNSW.

Nan Wu presented her paper titled “Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage of Cardinality Counting”   at ACM ASIA CCS’23

Hongsheng Hu, Shuo Wang, Ruoxi Sun, and Xuyun Zhang gave a tutorial called “Recent Advances and Challenges in Membership Inference Attacks on Machine Learning” at ACM AsiaCCS’23 

  • Data61-CS CRC students, post docs and team members attended the Cyber Security CRC Symposium in Brisbane in July at UQ. What a great way to promote our students’s achievements and network in person. We all learned a lot about the great deliverables of CS CRC projects.
  • Deepfake workshop at AsiaCCS’23 conference in Melbourne on the 10th of July 2023. Title is ” Security implications of deepfake Le and cheapfakes. We had an amazing workshop co-located with AsiaCCS’23 yesterday titled “The security implications of deepfake and cheapfake wdc’23”. We got very diverse paper submissions from USA, Europe and Asia including leading teams in deepfake. Our acceptance rate was around 47%. We had a thoughtful keynote speech delivered by Prof. Ganna Pogrebna titled “Temporal Evolution of Human Perceptions and Detection of Deepfakes: An Empirical Study”. We also enjoyed an excellent panel discussion of diverse perspectives from academia, industry and government agencies to have broader thoughts around deepfake. Thanks for our amazing panel members (Dr. Kendra Vant from Xero, Assoc Prof. Asher Flynn from Monash University, Prof. Rob Cover from RMIT, Dr. SHAHROZ TARIQ from CSIRO’s Data61) for accepting and sharing their valuable insights. Thanks to the workshop co-chairs who worked hard to make this happen including Kristen Moore, Sharif Abuadbba, PhD,  SHAHROZ TARIQ from CSIRO’s Data61 as well as Simon Woo from SKKU University South Korea leading DASH lab (https://dash-lab.github.io/About/) and predominant in deepfake research.
  • Farina Riaz has attended Women in AI for Good conference where she has met multiple females from CSIRO including Director of National AI Centre, Stela Solar.
  • Farina Riaz has attended On Workshop arranged by CSIRO in Lindfield where she got a chance to meet all CSIRO board members including Larry Marshall and Bronwyn Fox and CSIRO staff from different departments.  
  • Raymond Zhao and Josef Pieprzyk serve as program committee members for Asiacrypt 2023 (CORE rank A conference), see https://asiacrypt.iacr.org/2023/callforpapers.php
  • Fatemeh Jalalvand and Ronal Singh attended the ON Opportunity Workshop in Eveleigh.
  • Diksha Goel presented “Evolving Reinforcement Learning Environment to Minimize Learner’s Achievable Reward: An Application on Hardening Active Directory Systems” at the GECCO conference (CORE A) in Lisbon, Portugal.  This paper studies an attacker-defender Stackelberg game in configurable environment settings, where the defender aims to identify the environmental configuration where the attacker’s attainable reward is minimum. The paper will act as a valuable guide for enhancing network security by identifying optimal environmental configurations to minimize attacker rewards through the innovative combination of Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Diversity Optimization.
  • Shahroz Tariq, Kristen Moore and Sharif Abuadbba coordinated the 2nd WDC workshop at AsiaCCS. The 2nd Workshop on the security implications of Deepfakes and Cheapfakes (WDC ’23), co-located with ACM ASIACCS 2023, organised by Simon S. Woo, Shahroz Tariq, Sharif Abuadbba, and Kristen Moore. The workshop included 6 paper presentations, 1 keynote presentation, and 1 panel discussion. The topics covered various aspects of synthetic media, including detection, generation, robustness, the metaverse, security implications, and human perceptions. The event was a hybrid, and around 20-30 people attended.
  • On the 17/7/23, Behnam Tonekaboni and Akib Karim attended the Quantum Control Workshop at RMIT. Behnam presented on
    • Spectator qubit architecture optimized for random telegraph classical noise
    • Continuous-variable dynamical decoupling
    • CSIRO interest in pursuing quantum control besides Algorithms
  • A poster, “Multi-Writer Searchable Encryption with Fast Search and Post-Quantum Security” by Jiafan Wang and Dongxi Liu was exhibited at ICDCS 2023 (CORE A).
  • Jiafan Wang serves as the program committee/editorial board member for PETS 2024 (CORE A). 
  • We built a CSIRO’s Data61 team across groups (CQS and SS) within SCS to participate in the Trillion Parameter Consortium 2-day Hackathon around LLMs held at Argonne National Laboratory USA. The team includes Seung Jang, Bushra Sabir, David Nguyen, Tingting Bi, Cat Le Ngo.

Good news

  • Farina Riaz has successfully submitted Phd cosupervised by CSIRO in Quantum AI and started PostDoc with CQS team in Quantum AI Security on 5th June 2023.
  • DecaaS project (Kristen, Cody, & Surya) got the Merit Award at the ACT iAwards for the Technology Platform category.
  • On 29/05 Erik Buchholz, CSCRC student, won the People’s Choice as well as the second place overall at the AGSE 3MT competition presenting his research. 
    The corresponding LinkedIn post can be found at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erik-buchholz_agse-3mt-peoples-choice-award-activity-7069475094376431616-oPZO
  • M.A.P. Chamikara, Dongxi Liu, Seung Jang and Seyit Camtepe attended the NSW iAwards ceremony as one of the finalists in the “Technology Platform Solution” category.

Staff

Since the 1st of May 2023 we have welcomed:

  • 1 Principal Research Scientist, Sid Chau
  • 6 Postdocs: Diksha Goel, Nan Wu, David N’Guyen, Farina Riaz, Bushra Sabir, Nan Wang
  • 1 Research Technician Masooma Iftikhar
  • 2 Research Scientists: Sebastian Kish and Shangqi Lai
  • 2 Engineers: Michael Robinson and Leo Ly

We wish all the best to Thomas Wijaya who is exploring a new opportunity in industry.

Let’s meet some of our new team members:

Farina, through the Impossible Without You Programme, has commenced her CERC Postdoctoral Fellowship with CSIRO. Additionally, she has accomplished the submission of a collaborative PhD with CSIRO Data61 at the University of Southern Queensland(UniSQ), specializing in quantum Artificial Intelligence. Her educational background includes a master’s degree in computer software engineering from Pakistan, where she also completed an internship at CERN Lab in Switzerland, focusing on Grid Automation. In 2007, she gained experience as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer at NERO Company. With 9 publications in journals and conferences, she has made significant contributions to her field. During her PhD journey, Farina serves as the HDR Student representative at the UniSQ research group, actively participating in important research-related decision-making processes. She possesses 4 years of teaching experience as a lecturer in various universities in Dubai, UAE. Farina’s present research revolves around the utilization of Quantum Machine Learning Security. By conducting research at CSIRO Data61, she has created ground-breaking models that have surpassed the effectiveness of Classical Machine Learning methods. Her impressive portfolio includes over 11 journal publications, and she was also honoured as the runner-up for the People’s Choice Award in Quantum Australia 2023.

David is a CERC Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO’s Data61. He attended School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney for his PhD in generative models for cyber deception, which was done in collaboration with the Cybersecurity CRC. David has broad interest in a range of topics at intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity, including AI-based network security and trustworthiness and robustness of AI models.

Nan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Data61, CSIRO. He holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science at the Australian National University, Australia. His research interests include various privacy-enhancing technologies, such as cryptographic protocols, zero-knowledge proofs, distributed system security, blockchain security and AI security. His publications span various prestigious conferences and journals, such as IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Asiacrypt, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and ACM e-Energy. He won the Best Paper Award at ACM e-Energy ’21. Prior to his PhD study, he had several years of experience working in industry as a senior software engineer.

Networking

  • Dr Gaurav Varshney, Assistant Professor from IIT Jammu, India came to visit us at Marsfield to strengthen our collaboration with IITs in India. He carried out research activities on Anti Phishing and Privacy. He worked with Dr. Nazatul Sultan and Dr. Sharif Abuadbba. 

Regular Events

Data61 has established a new quantum technology program, focused in the areas of quantum software, quantum security, and quantum algorithms & applications. This seminar series will invite quantum experts to provide an updated summary of the global research on the topics of interest, highlight key challenges in the development of quantum technologies and stimulate new ideas for future research directions. The seminar series will also provide engagement and networking opportunities for Data61 researchers. The seminars will be scheduled on the last Wednesday (3-4 PM AEST) of every month.

In collaboration with Quantum Technology FSP; for more info https://research.csiro.au/qt/

  • 6G security seminar series

This seminar series is part of the 6G Security Research and Development Program conducted on behalf of the Australian Government – Department of Home Affairs. The Program aims to conduct foundational research into the security requirements of 6G technologies, and shape the development of 6G telecommunications standards internationally.

For more info: https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/our-6g-security-and-privacy-seminars/