October 2020

Publications:

  • Seyit Camtepe, Josef Pieprzyk, Garrison Gao, George Hobbs, Jo Dawson: work on nature driven security and positioning has attracted attention of media as well as JPL@NASA. The team will explore potential JPL an Defence joint works following the completion of the patent process.
  • Veronika Kuchta, Amin Sakzad, Damien Stehlé, Ron Steinfeld, Shifeng Sun: Measure-Rewind-Measure: Tighter Quantum Random Oracle Model Proofs for One-Way to Hiding and CCA Security. EUROCRYPT (3) 2020: 703-728, Eurocrypt is one of the top security conferences.
  • Tsz Hon Yuen, Shifeng Sun, Joseph K. Liu, Man Ho Au, Muhammed F. Esgin, Qingzhao Zhang, Dawu Gu: RingCT 3.0 for Blockchain Confidential Transaction: Shorter Size and Stronger Security. Financial Cryptography 2020: 464-483, paper in one of the top security conferences.
  • Shifeng Sun, Amin Sakzad, Ron Steinfeld, Joseph K. Liu, Dawu Gu: Public-Key Puncturable Encryption: Modular and Compact Constructions. Public Key Cryptography (1) 2020: 309-338, paper in one of the top security conferences.

Projects

  • The 2020 Workshop on Human Centric Software Engineering & Cyber Security (HCSE&CS-2020) was successfully held virtually on September 21, 2020. The workshop had a whole day program including a Key Note, two Panel Discussions and 10 Paper Presentations.
  •  Uncrackable encryption with space entropy mining

Dr Seyit Campete and his team, in collaboration with Macquarie University, developed a system for mining data on entropy from deep space to potentially deliver truly random number generation, and therefore uncrackable encryption and a universal navigation system.

The project would use telescope dishes to collect data from a neutron star that has been sending pulses towards Earth for millions of years. Data61 is developing methods for mining high entropy from factors including pulse intensity, as well as low entropy from regular pulses to provide a method for precise positioning and timing.

“We envision three important applications for natural entropy in mind from past us, the first application is shared physical randomness (that would be) universally shareable. It’s really random, lasting and bears no human influence. The second is new hybrid universal methods for positioning. And the third is perfect secrecy,” he said.

“How much would organisations pay to secure their space as assets and how much will Defence pay to access and literally universal positioning solution?”

Dr Campete said as far as he is aware, no other country is currently using entropy mining for security purposes, so the project could give Australia a competitive edge

  • Scholarships available in our Human Centric Team (application closing 31/10/20):

CSIRO’s Postgraduate Top-Up Scholarship Program provides enhanced opportunities in science and engineering for outstanding graduates enrolling each year at Australian tertiary institutions as postgraduates for research leading to the award of a PhD.  CSIRO PhD Top Up scholarships are now being offered in 40 CSIRO research areas, for funding commencing in financial year 2020-21.

Project name: Human-factor Security Analytics (Data61 3)
Location:   Various locations across Australia
Scholarship:  Top-up scholarship of $7,000 per annum, plus a generous operating budget of $10,000 per annum
For more information please contact Marthie Grobler or Mohan Baruwal Chhetri by emailing humancentricsecurity@csiro.au

For details of the research areas available please see document CSIRO Postgraduate Scholarships – Data61

https://jobs.csiro.au/job/Various-CSIRO-Postgraduate-Scholarships-Data61/671668800/

Students:

Let’s meet one of our students: Jishan E. Giti https://research.csiro.au/scs/september-jishan-e-giti/

New starters:

John Wondoh has just joined Data61 as a JV employee working as a Post-doctoral Research Associate on the Autonomic Computing for Resilient Cyber Operations CRP. Welcome John!

Media Activities

  • Our New research called DangerousCloak reveals it’s possible to backdoor the object detectors to digitally disappear from camera detection with relative ease.

https://algorithm.data61.csiro.au/new-research-reveals-its-possible-to-digitally-disappear-from-camera-detection/?utm_source=InvisCloakB_Algo30&utm_medium=hyperlink&utm_campaign=InvisCloakB&utm_term=InvisCloakB_Algo30&utm_content=InvisCloakB_Algo30

  • Researchers from CSIRO’s Data61, the data and digital specialist arm of Australia’s national science agency, and the Monash Blockchain Technology Centre have developed the world’s most efficient blockchain protocol that is both secure against quantum computers and protects the privacy of its users and their transactions.

https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2020/Researchers-develop-worlds-most-efficient-quantum-safe-and-privacy-preserving-blockchain-protocol

Spotlight on some of our staff and students who are telling us a bit more about themselves:

Events

  • The Software and Computational Systems Program is organising a series of Students Workshops designed to equip our PhD students with extra tools that set them up to thrive during their time with SCS, and into employment.

This series of three workshops will focus on practical skills for students – how to write a competitive CV; how to approach self-marketing on social platforms; how to merge from independent research into group collaboration; how to generate and manage commercialisation opportunities. The sessions will also exposure students to real-world accounts of career journeys from senior research experts.

For more information: https://research.csiro.au/scs/scs-phd-student-workshop-sessions/

  • The Human Centric Security team was successful in being awarded a Cutting Edge Science and Engineering Symposium award for 2019/2020. The jointly hosted symposium “Advances in personalised healthcare and wellbeing support technologies (OzDHI2020)” will be organised by the Precision Health Future Science Platform, CSIRO’s Data61 and CSIRO’s Health and Biosciences.

The OzDHI Symposium organisers are pleased to invite key leaders in Digital and Precision Health to attend and participate in the Symposium. This two-day symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary stakeholder group to collaboratively deliberate the way forward for Australia’s next-generation of intelligent and efficient personalised healthcare and wellbeing support services. The Symposium targets the Australian healthcare and wellbeing ecosystem, including all partners and stakeholders within the Australian digital health and wellbeing space, as well as CSIRO staff associated with the Precision Health Future Science Platform. Targeted attendees include PhD students and Early Career Researchers, researchers, academics and industry partners who are stakeholders in the promotion of positive lifestyle changes through digital health. Together, we aim to achieve a better understanding of consumer use, adoption and concerns regarding precision health and wellbeing management.

Originally scheduled for 20 May 2020, the Symposium will now be held virtually, on the 19/11 and 20/11/20. For more details, please email ozdhi@csiro.au.

For registration and more information visit: OzDHI.

Cost: Free

Achievements:

Awanthika Senarath, a previous Data61 PhD scholarship recipient placed with SCS under the supervision of Dr Marthie Grobler, wins UNSW 2020 Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis. Congratulations Awanthika!

https://research.csiro.au/scs/awanthika-senarath-wins-unsw-2020-deans-award-for-outstanding-phd-thesis/

Our next SAO seminar:

We are organising monthly free seminars in collaboration with Cyber Security CRC open to all, on Cyber security technical topics, inviting top experts from around the world as guest speakers.

Security of 4G and 5G cellular networks

Date: October 16th, 10 AM – 11 AM AEST.

Guest Speaker: Professor Elisa Bertino, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States.

Elisa Bertino is professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. She serves as Director of the Purdue Cyberspace Security Lab (Cyber2Slab). As the world moves to 4G and 5G cellular networks, security and privacy are paramount importance and new tools are needed to ensure them. For example, LTEInspector is a model-based testing approach that combines a symbolic model checker and a cryptographic protocol verifier in the symbolic attacker model. Using it, researchers have uncovered 10 new attacks along with 9 prior attacks, categorized into three abstract classes (i.e., security, user privacy, and disruption of service), in three procedures of 4G LTE. Notable among the findings is the authentication relay attack that enables an adversary to spoof the location of a legitimate user to the core network without possessing appropriate credentials. To ensure that the exposed attacks pose real threats and are indeed realizable in practice, 8 of the 10 new attacks have been validated and their accompanying adversarial assumptions have been put through a real testbed. On-going work in addressing some of those vulnerabilities points the way toward an agenda of further research.

To register to our mailing list please send an email to sao@csiro.au

For more information or if you have missed previous events: https://research.csiro.au/cybersecurity-quantum-systems/our-sao-seminars/

For more information on our events visit our website: link