Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik is giving two keynote talks this month. The first is Oct. 3 at the 5th International Workshop on Genome Privacy and Security (GenoPri) in Basel, Switzerland. In his invited talk, “Security in Personal Genomics: Lest We Forget,” he will argue that “genomic security must be taken seriously.” He will discuss the problem space, identify the stakeholders, discuss assumptions about such stakeholders, and outline both possible approaches and future research opportunities. The main goal of the work, which is a collaboration with Xinyi Ding of Southern Methodist University, is to “highlight the importance of genomic security as a research topic in its own right.”

The second talk, “Coping with Tensions between Security and Safety in Simple IoT/CPS Devices,” is Oct. 19 at the ACM Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems Security & Privacy (CPS-SPC) in Toronto. Tsudik will discuss remote attestation, a means of malware detection, especially for low-end embedded devices. He will identify issues that arise in “reconciling requirements of safety-critical operation with those of secure remote attestation” and will review some mitigation techniques, including “periodic self-measurements as well as interruptible attestation modality that involves shuffled memory traversals and various memory locking mechanisms.”

— Shani Murray