Grad students participate in global UCSB iCTF hacking competition; place third among U.S. teams

photo: UCSB iCTF ICS teamGraduate students from the SPROUT (Security & Privacy Research OUTfit) and SSLLAB (Secure Systems & Software Laboratory) research groups at UCI collaborated as a team, called KHCZUU Labs, to participate in this year’s UC Santa Barbara International Capture The Flag (iCTF) competition. The iCTF contest is an annual competition where academic teams pit their skills at cyber attacks and defenses against each other. In security capture-the-flag events, the teams compete to try to find vulnerabilities in programs provided by the organizers and hack other teams to steal “flags,” while defending their own flags. CTF events provide a realistic but safe environment to learn and practice how real-world computer security works.
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Tsudik Co-Authors Award-Winning Student Paper on ‘Violating Consumer Anonymity’

photo: Gene TsudikChancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik and Alberto Compagno, a visiting Ph.D. student from University of Rome (Italy), co-authored a paper titled “Violating Consumer Anonymity: Geo-locating Nodes in Named Data Networking” that received the Best Student Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2015 (ACNS 2015), which took place in New York in June. The paper’s other authors included Mauro Conti (University of Padua), Paolo Gasti (New York Institute of Technology) and Luigi V. Mancini (Sapienza University of Rome). View a PDF of the paper here.

Developing an ANTrepreneurial Spirit

Computer science freshman Alec Kriebel created and released an iOS app development course with the help of UCI’s Blackstone LaunchPad.

Computer science freshman Alec Kriebel first demonstrated his entrepreneurialism in the fourth grade. At his elementary school just outside of Reading, Pa., Kriebel established a small comics “company” with his classmates. They called it Bob Co. Comics —“something that a fourth grader would think of,” Kriebel quips today.

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UCI Data Science Initiative awarded $1.25 million from NASA for minority research opportunities

photo: Padhraic SmythUCI has been awarded $1.25 million from NASA as part of a new $5-million 5-year award to establish a new center at Cal State LA for STEM education. This new center will collaborate with UCI’s Data Science Initiative and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)’s Center for Data Science and Technology to train undergraduate and masters students in areas such as climate change, hydrology, computational physics, and data science with an emphasis on minority and low-income students.

Professor Padhraic Smyth, UCI Data Science Initiative Director, will be UCI’s PI on the project and will be working with five other UCI faculty members from engineering, physical science and computer science to host Cal State LA students for short summer workshops and lab visits. The funding will support a project coordinator and provide some summer support for participating faculty and Ph.D. students.

For more information, click here.