Graduation 2019
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SRG Lunch
Some photos for our lunch to celebrate the end of semester, beginning of summer, and congratulate Weilin Xu on his PhD:
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Congratulations Dr. Xu!
Congratulations to Weilin Xu for successfully defending his PhD Thesis!
Although machine learning techniques have achieved great success in many areas, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and computer security, recent studies have shown that they are not robust under attack. A motivated adversary is often able to craft input samples that force a machine learning model to produce incorrect predictions, even if the target model achieves high accuracy on normal test inputs. This raises great concern when machine learning models are deployed for security-sensitive tasks.
A Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware
Sam Havron (BSCS 2017) is quoted in an article in Wired on eradicating stalkerware:
The full extent of that stalkerware crackdown will only prove out with time and testing, says Sam Havron, a Cornell researcher who worked on last year’s spyware study. Much more work remains. He notes that domestic abuse victims can also be tracked with dual-use apps often overlooked by antivirus firms, like antitheft software Cerberus. Even innocent tools like Apple’s Find My Friends and Google Maps’ location-sharing features can be abused if they don’t better communicate to users that they may have been secretly configured to share their location. “This is really exciting news,” Havron says of Kaspersky’s stalkerware change. “Hopefully it will spur the rest of the industry to follow suit. But it’s just the very first thing.”
Violations of Children’s Privacy Laws
The New York Times has an article, How Game Apps That Captivate Kids Have Been Collecting Their Data about a lawsuit the state of New Mexico is bringing against app markets (including Google) that allow apps presented as being for children in the Play store to violate COPPA rules and mislead users into tracking children. The lawsuit stems from a study led by Serge Egleman’s group at UC Berkeley that analyzed COPPA violations in children’s apps. Serge was an undergraduate student here (back in the early 2000s) – one of the things he did as a undergraduate was successfully sue a spammer.
Wahoos at Oakland
UVA Group Dinner at IEEE Security and Privacy 2018
Including our newest faculty member, Yongwhi Kwon, joining UVA in Fall 2018!
Yuan Tian, Fnu Suya, Mainuddin Jonas, Yongwhi Kwon, David Evans, Weihang Wang, Aihua Chen, Weilin Xu
## Poster Session
Fnu Suya (with Yuan Tian and David Evans), Adversaries Don’t Care About Averages: Batch Attacks on Black-Box Classifiers [PDF]
Mainuddin Jonas (with David Evans), Enhancing Adversarial Example Defenses Using Internal Layers [PDF]
