Wednesday, April 21, 2010

CyLab News Update: Recent Awards & Activities Highlight Strength & Scope of Program

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) in the lab of Nikola Tesla, spring of 1894.

CyLab News Update: Recent Awards & Activities Highlight Strength & Scope of Program

By Richard Power


Here are brief excerpts on CyLab news stories about three awards and four activities from the first third of 2010 (with links to the full text of posts). These items highlight the strength and scope of CyLab's world-class research program.

Stay tuned, it is going to be an exciting year!

CyLab's Anupam Datta Named to SHARPS Multi-University Research Effort into Health IT Security & Privacy
Carnegie Mellon University’s Anupam Datta is part of a multi-institutional research team that received a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to reduce security and privacy barriers to the meaningful use of health information technology. Datta, an Assistant Research Professor with Carnegie Mellon CyLab, is one of twenty senior investigators from twelve institutions involved in this collaborative project named Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS). Carnegie Mellon’s portion of the award is around $700,000 spread over 4 years. Full text.

Carnegie Mellon CyLab’s David Brumley Receives Prestigious Early Career Award from National Science Foundation
Carnegie Mellon University CyLab's David Brumley has received the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, its most prestigious award for junior faculty.
Brumley, 35, who is a CyLab researcher as well as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Computer Science, received a five-year, $521,494 award to develop a system that will track and eliminate annoying software bugs.
Full text.

CyLab Researchers Win ACM WiSec Best Paper Award for Mobile User Location-specific Encryption (MULE)
CyLab's Technical Director Adrian Perrig and graduate student Ahren Studer have won Best Paper for the Association of Computing Machiner (ACM) Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec).
The award-winning paper is entitled: "Mobile User Location-specific Encryption (MULE): Using Your Office as Your Password."

Full text.

CUPS wins Google Focused Research Award
Dr. Lorrie Cranor, CUPS Director, has been named one of the recipients of a Google Focused Research Award ... According to Google, "These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise."
Dr. Cranor is one of thirty-one professors at ten universities, working on twelve different projects.
Full text.

A Report from "Hacking Comes of Age: Climategate, Cyber-Espionage and iWar," a University Lecture Series Event
On March 18, 2010, six distinguished speakers participated in a Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Series (ULS) panel on "Hacking Comes of Age: Climategate, Cyber-Espionage and iWar." The panel explored these issues with uncommon depth and uncommon clarity. This event was a testimonial on just how uniquely situated Carnegie Mellon University really is, to serve as a vital national resource; the event also underscored the importance of CyLab's role within the University, cultivating, as it does, both the human factor and the technological edge. (Indeed, five of the six panel participants have some CyLab affiliation.) Full text.

A Report on the CyLab Silicon Valley Briefing
On 3-8-10, an impressive gathering was held at the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Campus in NASA Research Park. The presenters were CyLab researchers. The other participants consisted of CEOs, VPs, CTOs, CSOs and leading technologists from a range of companies including Cisco and Microsoft to WhiteHat Security and iSEC, along with regional representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the U.S. Secret Service, as well as Board of Directors members from the local chapters of Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS). Full text.

CyLab's Cranor Testifies on Privacy Issues to Joint Hearing of Two Congressional Subcommittee
On 2-24-10, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittees on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection and Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a joint hearing titled, "The Collection and Use of Location Information for Commercial Purposes."
Lorrie Cranor, Director of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) testified on the privacy issues related to the use of location information for commercial purposes.

Full text.

For more about CyLab, visit http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/