Jennifer Seberry Lecture:
My Fifty Years of Cryptography: the Evolution of Cryptographic Standards
(3 July 9.30am)
Presenter: Emeritus Professor Jennifer Seberry, IC2, University of Wollongong, Australia
Abstract: Today, e-commerce and the internet occupy everyone’s mind — merchants, programmers, bankers, consumers and teenagers. A few years ago, the then-fledgling industry was struggling to convince the public to make purchases and do financial transactions online. A key element that the industry needed to address was the public’s concern about the security of online processes and transactions. The science of modern cryptography — a field based on advanced mathematical concepts that include number theory and group theory — was identified as a vehicle for securing public confidence in the safety of e-commerce transactions. The effective application of cryptographic mathematics to e-commerce has proved to be a key factor in its current level of acceptance. Modern cryptography is a relatively new field. Before 1970, the world of encrypting and decrypting messages was primarily a black art practiced by government security agencies and the military without a consistent framework. The early to mid-1970s saw the emergence of mathematical cryptography, which provided a robust theoretical framework for encryption and decryption that enabled cryptographers to predict the security of the message.
Bio: Dr Seberry is an Emeritus Professor and Former Head, Department of Computer Science, as well as Former Director, Centre for Computer Security Research, University of Wollongong. She graduated PhD in Computation Mathematics from La Trobe University in 1971. She has subsequently held positions at the Australian National University, The University of Sydney and University College, The Australian Defence Force Academy, The University of New South Wales. She has published extensively in Discrete Mathematics and is world renown for her new discoveries on Hadamard matrices, orthogonal designs and statistical designs. In 1970 she co-founded the series of conferences known as the xxth Australian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. She started Teaching in Cryptology and Computer Security in 1980. She is especially interested in cryptographic algorithms, authentication and privacy, In 1987 at University College, ADFA, she founded the Centre for Computer and Communications Security Research to be a resevoir of expertise for the Australian community. Her studies of the application of discrete mathematics and combinatorial computing via bent functions, S-box design, has led to the design of secure crypto-algorithms and strong hashing algorithms for secure and reliable information transfer in networks and telecommunications. Her studies of Hadamard matrices and orthogonal designs are applied in CDMA technologies. In 1990 she founded the AUSCRYPT/ASIACRYPT series of International Cryptologic Conferences in the Asia/Oceania area. She has supervised 31 successful PhD candidates, has over 450 scholarly papers and eight books.
Keynote 1:
Advanced Forward and Backward Searchable Symmetric Encryption
(3 July 2.30pm)
Presenter: Professor Joseph K. Liu, Monash University, Australia
Abstract: In this talk, we will cover the state-of-the-art techniques for searchable symmetric encryption that can achieve forward and backward security, which can enhance the dynamic encrypted database from suffering attacks such as file injection attack. Our techniques not only provide enhanced security but also achieve a practical level of efficiency, by using symmetric primitives only. We will incorporate our findings from our most recent publications (including CCS 2018 and ESORICS 2019) into this talk.
Bio: Joseph Liu is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. He got his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2004. Prior to joining Monash at 2015, he has worked as a research scientist at Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore for more than 7 years. His research areas include cybersecurity, blockchain, IoT security, applied cryptography and privacy-enhanced technology. He has received more than 5700 citations and his H-index is 43, with more than 170 publications in top venues such as CRYPTO, ACM CCS. He is currently the lead of the Monash Cyber Security Group. He has established the Monash Blockchain Technology Centre at 2019 and serves as the founding director. His remarkable research in linkable ring signature forms the theory basis of Monero (XMR), one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world. He has been given the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research Impact in 2018, and the prestigious ICT Researcher of the Year 2018 Award by the Australian Computer Society (ACS), the largest professional body in Australia representing the ICT sector, for his contribution to the blockchain and cybersecurity community.
Keynote 2:
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Blockchain Technology
(4 July 9.30am)
Presenter: Professor Jong Sou Park, Korea Aerospace University, Korea
Abstract: We expect the Fourth Industrial Revolution will change so many things. But we really do not understand what the Fourth Industrial Revolution is. In this talk, we want to talk about Blockchain Technology and Federated Learning. The Federated Learning offers a very promising future for privacy enhanced edge level A.I. with Blockchain smart contract. Maybe, this Federated Learning can bring real impact on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Bio: Dr. Park graduated from Korea Aerospace Univ. 1983. He got Masters Degree from North Carolina Sate Univ. in 1986. He got Ph. D. Degree from the Pennsylvania State Univ. in 1994. After getting Ph. D. he worked as an Assistant Prof. at Pennsylvania State Univ. Dept. of Computer Engineering from 1994 -1996. After working for Penn State, he worked for Korea Aerospace Univ. from 1996 until now. He published many research journal papers about Network Security and recent days, he is very much interested in Blockchain Technology. He has given more than 100 lectures about Blockchain Technology to companies like KT-Net, KT, POSCO, Samsung, LG, etc. He also has given lectures about Blockchain Technology to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Vietnam.
Keynote 3:
Machine Learning in the Hands of a Malicious Adversary: The Threat of AI-Driven Smart Malware
(4 July 1.30pm)
Presenter: Professor Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Abstract: Targeted and sophisticated cyber-attacks are on the rise. Attackers spend a significant amount of time preparing attacks (including reconnaissance, weaponization, and exploitation), which require them to retain a lasting foothold in the target system to collect the intelligence necessary to seize control of the victim’s system. To avoid being exposed while performing those activities, highly sophisticated adversaries may employ AI-driven methods to accomplish the task of preparing an attack strategy and triggering the execution of a malicious payload. In this talk, we discuss the security threat of AI-driven smart malware. Specifically, we consider a scenario in which machine learning models can be embedded into malware that, upon installation, learns the details of the victim system, infers attack strategies based on live operational data, and triggers an attack at the most opportune time so as to maximize the impact. We illustrate this threat in the context of two safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS): (i) a surgical robot, for which we consider a robot-supported haptic feedback rendering algorithm as an application, and (ii) a smart building, for which we consider a CPS that manages and controls the environment in which a major computing enterprise (e.g., a high-performance computing system or a cloud infrastructure) operates. We show how smart malware can be developed and used to compromise the critical functionalities/services provided by the CPS with dire consequences for patients (in the case of the surgical robot) or a large computing infrastructure (in the case of the smart building).
Bio: Dr. Zbigniew T. Kalbarczyk is Research Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kalbarczyk’s research interests are in the area of design and validation of reliable and secure computing systems. His current work explores emerging technologies, such as resource virtualization to provide redundancy and assure system resiliency to accidental errors and malicious attacks. Dr. Kalbarczyk’s research involves also analysis of data on failures and security attacks in large computing systems, and development of techniques for automated validation and benchmarking of dependable and secure computing systems using formal (e.g., model checking) and experimental methods (e.g., fault/attack injection). He served as a Program Chair of Dependable Computing and Communication Symposium (DCCS), a track of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2007 and Program Co-Chair of Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium, a track of the DSN 2002. He has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. Dr. Kalbarczyk has published over 130 technical papers and is regularly invited to give tutorials and lectures on issues related to design and assessment of complex computing systems. He is a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.