Category: InfoSec group

UCL’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity

It has become increasingly apparent that the world’s cybersecurity challenges will not be resolved by specialists working in isolation.

Indeed, it has become clear that the challenges that arise from the integration of emerging technologies into existing social, commercial, legal and political systems will not be resolved by specialists working in isolation. Rather, these complex problems require the efforts of people who can cross disciplinary boundaries, communicate beyond their own fields, and comprehend the context in which others operate. Computer science, information security, encryption, criminology, psychology, international relations, public policy, philosophy of science, legal studies, and economics combine to form the ecosystem within which cybersecurity problems and solutions are found but training people to think and work across these boundaries has proven difficult.

UCL is delighted to have been awarded funding by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to establish a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cybersecurity that will help to establish a cadre of leaders in security with the breadth of perspective and depth of skills required to handle the complex challenges in security faced by our society. The CDT is led by Prof Madeline Carr (Co-Director; UCL Science, Technology, and Public Policy), Prof Shane Johnson (Co-Director; UCL Security and Crime Science), and Prof David Pym (Director; UCL Programming Principles, Logic, and Verification (PPLV) and Information Security).

The CDT is an exciting collaboration that brings together research teams in three of UCL’s departments – Computer Science, Security and Crime Science, and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Public Policy – in order to increase the capacity of the UK to respond to future information and cybersecurity challenges. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the CDT will train cohorts of highly skilled experts drawn from across the spectrum of the engineering and social sciences, able to become the next generation of UK leaders in industry and government, public policy, and scientific research. The CDT will equip them with a broad understanding of all sub-fields of cybersecurity, as well as specialized knowledge and transferable skills to be able to operate professionally in business, academic, and policy circles.

The CDT will admit candidates with a strong background in STEM (CS, Mathematics, Engineering, Physics) or Social Sciences (Psychology, Sociology, International Relations, Public Policy, Crime Science, Economics, and Management), either recent graduates or mid-career. Each will be trained in research and innovation skills in the multidisciplinary facets of cybersecurity, (computing, crime science, management and public policy) and then specialise within a discipline, with industrial experience through joint industrial projects and internships.

For more information, including directions for applications, please visit the cybersecurity CDT website.

Hiring Research Assistants and PhD students

We’re happy to announce that we have several open positions!

Privacy & machine learning

Emiliano De Cristofaro has at least one post-doc position in privacy and machine learning. The researcher will work with him and others in UCL’s InfoSec group. For a sample of our recent work in the field, please see Emiliano’s publications on this topic.

Please email jobs@emilianodc.com with questions or apply directly before 25 July 2019.

Note that we would be keen to hear from both PhD students looking for part-time research work, as well as people looking for longer-term full-time post-doctoral positions.

Web measurements

Multiple positions are available in the context of a project based at the Alan Turing Institute on cyberbullying and cyberhate, led by Emiliano De Cristofaro and Gareth Tyson. The project will primarily focus on measurements research, i.e., gathering and analysing various types of social datasets.

For a sample of our recent work in this space, please see Emiliano’s publications on this topic.

Again, we would be keen to hear from both PhD students looking for part-time research work, as well as people looking for longer-term full-time post-doctoral positions.

Please email edecristofaro@turing.ac.uk if you have questions.

PhD positions with Philipp Jovanovic

Members of the InfoSec group are always looking for talented PhD students to join their team. If you would like to investigate opportunities, please do check their website for details of their research interests and contact instructions. We are particularly happy to announce that Philipp Jovanovic will join our group as an Associate Professor starting in January 2020, and he is inviting applications for PhD students.

Philipp’s research interests broadly cover applied cryptography, privacy, and decentralised systems. His current work focuses on building scalable, privacy-preserving, decentralised protocols (such as ByzCoin, RandHound, OmniLedger, or Calypso). He has also worked on a wide variety of other security-related topics in the past, including design and analysis of symmetric cryptographic primitives, side-channel attacks and countermeasures, and the security analysis of systems deployed in the real world such as the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol or the Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP).

For an overview of his work, please visit Philipp’s website.

If you’re interested in working with Philipp as a PhD student, please email philipp@jovanovic.io.

New CDT in cybersecurity

We have several PhD positions funded through the new Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity (CDT). Please see the article about the CDT for more details and instructions to apply.

EPFL blockchain summer school

This year EPFL hosted a Blockchain Summer School from the 21st to the 24th of June. UCL was well represented with Sarah Meiklejohn presenting two talks whilst Sarah Azouvi, Patrick McCorry, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Alexander Hicks also attended. This blog post is a joint effort from the four of us, aimed at highlighting the talks presented last week.

Patrick, Sarah, Sarah, Mustafa, Rebekah (UCL alumni) and Alex. Credit: Emin Gün Sirer

The Summer School featured talks on several aspects of blockchain technology ranging from classical distributed computing, security of smart contracts in Ethereum and proving the security of proof of work/stake. Here, we will provide a small summary for each of the talks. Slides can be found by clicking on each talk on the school’s program page.

TLS-N: Non-repudiation over TLS Enabling Ubiquitous Content Signing for Disintermediation by Arthur Gervais: Gervais’ talk highlights that a slight modification to TLS can allow a smart contract to verify the authenticity of data received from website.  Essentially, at the end of the TLS session the server signs evidence of the TLS session if requested by the client. This evidence is verified and stored by the smart contract. It is also worth mentioning that the protocol relies on redactable signatures that ensures private data isn’t revealed.

Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts – Ari Juels: Juel’s talk highlights that trusted execution environments can be leveraged to build authenticated data feeds. This trusted hardware communicates with the website before sending the data to the smart contract.  It is responsible for setting up a HTTPS session and fetching data from a website before sending the data to the smart contract. TownCrier is currently implemented using Intel SGX and is currently released for testing.

It is also worth mentioning that Juels beautifully provided a good definition for a smart contract:

“A smart contract is a trusted third party with public state.”

This is one of the reasons why cryptography and smart contracts are a great combination. The contract can ensure the cryptography is faithfully executed, whereas the cryptography can provide integrity and confidentiality for data used by the contract.

Continue reading EPFL blockchain summer school

Can Games Fix What’s Wrong with Computer Security Education?

We had the pleasure of Zachary Peterson visiting UCL on a Cyber Security Fulbright Scholarship. The title is from his presentation given at our annual ACE-CSR event in November 2016.

Zachary Peterson is an associate professor of computer science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. The key problem he is trying to solve is that the educational system is producing many fewer computer security professionals than are needed; an article he’d seen just two days before the ACE meeting noted a 73% rise in job vacancies in the last year despite a salary premium of 9% over other IT jobs. This information is backed up by the 2014 Taulbee survey, which found that the number of computer security PhDs has declined to 4% of the US total. Lack of diversity, which sees security dominated by white and Asian males, is a key contributing factor. Peterson believes that diversity is not only important as a matter of fairness, but essential because white males are increasingly a demographic minority in the US and because monocultures create perceptual blindness. New perspectives are especially needed in computer security as present approaches are not solving the problem on their own.

Peterson believes that the numbers are so bad because security is under-represented in both the computer science curriculum and in curriculum standards. The ACM 2013 curriculum guidelines recommend only three contact hours (also known as credit hours) in computer security in an entire undergraduate computer science degree. These are typically relegated to an upper-level elective class, and subject to a long chain of prerequisites, so they are only ever seen by a self-selected group who have survived years of attrition – which disproportionately affects women. The result is to create a limited number of specialists, unnecessarily constrain the student body, and limit the time students have to practice before joining the workforce. In addition, the self-selected group who do study security late in their academic careers have developed both set habits and their mind set before encountering an engineering task. Changing security into a core competency and teaching it as early as secondary school is essential but has challenges: security can be hard, and pushing it to the forefront may worsen existing problems seen in computer science more broadly, such as the solitary, anti-social, creativity-deficient image perception of the discipline.

Peterson believes games can help improve this situation. CTFTime, which tracks games events, reports a recent explosion in cyber security games to over 56 games events per year since 2013. These games, if done correctly, can teach core security skills in an entertaining – and social – way, with an element of competition. Strategic thinking, understanding an adversary’s motivation, rule interpretation, and rule-breaking are essential for both game-playing and security engineering.

Continue reading Can Games Fix What’s Wrong with Computer Security Education?

Diversity is our strength

On Friday evening, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending visas to citizens of seven countries for at least 90 days. Among the many other implications of this ban — none of which we want to minimise with our focus on the implications for academics — this now implies that (1) students who are citizens (even dual citizens) of these countries are now unable to study in the US or attend conferences there, and (2) academics who are citizens of these countries and who legally work and live in the US are now unable to leave (to, say, attend conferences or visit another academic institution), as they would not be allowed back in.

We receive many inquiries each year from strong applicants from these seven countries, and according to a statement issued by many US-based academics, more than 3,000 Iranian students received PhDs from American universities in the past 3 years. Across our nine faculty members, we currently have funding available for numerous PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. If any student is stranded outside of the US, we of course hope that they are able to make it back quickly, but have funding for internships that would allow them to work from here in the interim. In organising conferences, we and our wider UCL colleagues are doing all we can to organise them in places without such bans in place, and where that is not possible to enable remote participation.

Most of all, as a group that prides itself on the quality and openness of its research and on its international reach, we would like to re-affirm our commitment to working with the best possible students and academics, regardless of their religion or their country of origin (or indeed anything aside from their scientific contributions). To quote a statement from the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR), “the open exchange of ideas requires freedom of movement.” To address the full effects of this ban we of course need far more international cooperation, but we hope that even our small actions can help mitigate the damage that has already been done to our friends and colleagues, both within and outside of the US, and that promises to continue to be done in the future.

Nicolas Courtois
Emiliano de Cristofaro
George Danezis
Jens Groth
Sarah Meiklejohn
Steven Murdoch
David Pym
Angela Sasse
Gianluca Stringhini

Steven Murdoch – Privacy and Financial Security

Probably not too many academic researchers can say this: some of Steven Murdoch’s research leads have arrived in unmarked envelopes. Murdoch, who has moved to UCL from the University of Cambridge, works primarily in the areas of privacy and financial security, including a rare specialty you might call “crypto for the masses”. It’s the financial security aspect that produces the plain, brown envelopes and also what may be his most satisfying work, “Trying to help individuals when they’re having trouble with huge organisations”.

Murdoch’s work has a twist: “Usability is a security requirement,” he says. As a result, besides writing research papers and appearing as an expert witness, his past includes a successful start-up. Cronto, which developed a usable authentication device, was acquired by VASCO, a market leader in authentication and is now used by banks such as Commerzbank and Rabobank.

Developing the Cronto product was, he says, an iterative process that relied on real-world testing: “In research into privacy, if you build unusable system two things will go wrong,” he says. “One, people won’t use it, so there’s a smaller crowd to hide in.” This issue affects anonymising technologies such as Mixmaster and Mixminion. “In theory they have better security than Tor but no one is using them.” And two, he says, “People make mistakes.” A non-expert user of PGP, for example, can’t always accurately identify which parts of the message are signed and which aren’t.

The start-up experience taught Murdoch how difficult it is to get an idea from research prototype to product, not least because what works in a small case study may not when deployed at scale. “Selling privacy remains difficult,” he says, noting that Cronto had an easier time than some of its forerunners since the business model called for sales to large institutions. The biggest challenge, he says, was not consumer acceptance but making a convincing case that the predicted threats would materialise and that a small company could deliver an acceptable solution.

Continue reading Steven Murdoch – Privacy and Financial Security

Workshop: Theory and Practice of Secure Multiparty Computation

Members of the UCL information security group visiting Aarhus rainbow panorama.
Members of the UCL information security group visiting the Aarhus rainbow panorama

The workshop was organized by CFEM and CTIC, and took place in Aarhus from May 30 until June 3, 2016. The speakers presented both theoretical advancements and practical implementations (e.g., voting, auction systems) of MPC, as well as open problems and future directions.

The first day started with Ivan Damgård presenting TinyTable, a new simple 2-party secure computation protocol. Then Martin Hirt introduced the open problem of general adversary characterization and efficient protocol generation. The last two talks of the day discussed Efficient Constant-Round Multiparty Computation and Privacy-Preserving Outsourcing by Distributed Verifiable Computation.

The first session of the second day included two presentations on theoretical results which introduced a series of three-round secure two-party protocols and their security guarantees, and fast circuit garbling under weak assumptions. On the practical side, Rafael Pass presented formal analysis of the block-chain, and abhi shelat outlined how MPC can enable secure matchings. After the lunch break, probabilistic termination of MPC protocols and low-effort VSS protocols were discussed.

Yuval Ishai and Elette Boyle kicked off the third day by presenting constructions of function secret sharing schemes, and recent developments in the area. After the lunch break, a new hardware design enabling Verifiable ASICs was introduced and the latest progress on “oblivious memories” were discussed.

The fourth day featured presentations on RAMs, Garbled Circuits and a discussion on the computational overhead of MPC under specific adversarial models. Additionally, there was a number of presentations on practical problems, potential solutions and deployed systems. For instance, Aaron Johnson presented a system for private measurements on Tor, and Cybernetica representatives demonstrated Sharemind and their APIs. The rump session of the workshop took place in the evening, where various speakers were given at most 7 minutes to present new problems or their latest research discoveries.

On the final day, Christina Brzuska outlined the connections between different types of obfuscation and one-way functions, and explained why some obfuscators were impossible to construct. Michael Zohner spoke about OT extensions, and how they could be used to improve 2-party computation in conjunction with look-up tables. Claudio Orlandi closed the workshop with his talk on Amortised Garbled Circuits, which explained garbling tricks all the way from Yao’s original work up to the state of the art, and provided a fascinating end to the week.

Come work with us!

I’m very pleased to announce that — along with George Danezis and Tomaso Aste, head of our Financial Computing group — I’ve been awarded a grant to continue our work on distributed ledgers (aka “blockchain-like things”) for the next three years.

Our group has already done a lot of research in this space, including George’s and my recent paper on centrally banked cryptocurrencies (at NDSS 2016) and Jens’ paper (along with Markulf Kohlweiss, a frequent UCL collaborator) on efficient ring signatures and applications to Zerocoin-style cryptocurrencies (at Eurocrypt 2015).  It’s great to have this opportunity to further investigate the challenges in this space and develop our vision for the future of these technologies, so big thanks to the EPSRC!

Anyway, the point of this post is to advertise, as part of this grant, three positions for postdoctoral researchers.  We are also seeking collaboration with any industrial partners investigating the potential usage of distributed ledgers, and in particular ones looking at the application of these ledgers across the following settings (or with a whole new setting in mind!):

  • Identity management. How can identities be stored, shared, and issued in a way that preserves privacy, prevents theft and fraud, and allows for informal forms of identity in places where no formal ones exist?
  • Supply chain transparency. How can supply chain information be stored in a way that proves integrity, preserves the privacy of individual actors, and can be presented to the end customer in a productive way?
  • Financial settlement. How can banking information be stored in a way that allows banks to easily perform gross settlement, reduces the burden on a central bank, and enables auditability of the proper functioning of the system?
  • Administration of benefits. How can benefits be administered to and used by disadvantaged populations in a way that preserves privacy, provides useful visibility into their spending, and protects against potential abuses of the system?

We expect the postdoctoral researchers to work with us and with each other on the many exciting problems in this space, which are spread across cryptography, computer and network security, behavioural economics, distributed systems, usable security, human-computer interaction, and software engineering (just to name a few!).  I encourage anyone interested to reach out to me (Sarah) to discuss this further, whether or not they’ve already done research on the particular topic of distributed ledgers.

That’s all for now, but please get in touch with me if you have any questions, and in the years to come I hope to invite many people to come work with us in London and to announce the various outcomes of this exciting project!

Jens Groth – Non-interactive zero knowledge proofs, efficient enough to be used in practice

The UCL information security group’s Jens Groth, a cryptographer, is one of 17 UCL researchers who have been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council. The five-year grant will fund his work on the cryptographic building block known as “zero-knowledge proofs”, a widely applicable technique that underpins both security and trust. ERC Starting Grants are intended to support up-and-coming research leaders who are beginning to set up a research team and conduct independent research. Groth’s focus is on making zero- knowledge proofs more efficient so that they can become cheap enough to become a commonly used, standard security technology. Groth is also the recipient of a second grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to fund his work on another related topic, structure-preserving pairing-based cryptography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XIekTniX00

“My line of thinking,” says Groth, “is that there’s been a lot of research into zero-knowledge proofs, but I don’t know of any groups taking entire systems from theory through to very practical implementations. I am hoping to build a group that will cover this entire span, and by covering it thoroughly get some very significant gains in efficiency.” Covering that entire spectrum from the purely abstract to the built system is important, he says, because “Practice can influence theory and give us some insight into what we should be looking at. Also, when you start implementing things, lots of surprising discoveries can come up.”

Unlike other types of cryptographic tools, such as public key cryptography, used in such widely used mass-market applications as SSL (used to secure data passed over the Web while in transit), Groth notes that zero-knowledge proofs are more likely to be a behind-the-scenes technology that end users will never touch directly.

“It will be hidden inside the system,” he says. “The main properties we want are completeness, soundness – and zero-knowledge.” Completeness means the prover can convince the verifier when a statement is true. Soundness means the prover cannot convince the verifier when the statement is false. Finally, zero-knowledge means that there is no leakage of information even if the prover is interacting with a fraudulent verifier.

Continue reading Jens Groth – Non-interactive zero knowledge proofs, efficient enough to be used in practice

ACE-CSR opening event 2015/16: talks on malware, location privacy and wiretap law

The opening event for the UCL Academic Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research in the 2015–2016 academic term featured three speakers: Earl Barr, whose work on approximating program equivalence has won several ACM distinguished paper awards; Mirco Musolesi from the Department of Geography, whose background includes a degree in computer science and an interest in analysing myriad types of data while protecting privacy; and Susan Landau, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a visiting professor at UCL and an expert on cyber security policy whose books include Privacy On the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (with Whitfield Diffie) and Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies.

Detecting malware and IP theft through program similarity

Earl Barr is a member of the software systems engineering group and the Centre for Research on Evolution, Search, and Testing. His talk outlined his work using program similarity to determine whether two arbitrary programs have the same behaviour in two areas relevant to cyber security: malware and intellectual property theft in binaries (that is, code reused in violation of its licence).

Barr began by outlining his work on detecting malware, comparing the problem to that facing airport security personnel trying to find a terrorist among millions of passengers. The work begins with profiling: collect two zoos, and then ask if the program under consideration is more likely to belong to the benign zoo or the malware zoo.

Rather than study the structure of the binary, Barr works by viewing the program as strings of 0s and 1s, which may not coincide with the program’s instructions, and using information theory to create a measure of dissimilarity, the normalised compression distance (NCD). The NCD serves as an approximation of the Kolmogorov Complexity, a mathematical measure of the complexity of the shortest description of an object, which is then normalised using a compression algorithm that ignores the details of the instruction set architecture for which the binary is written.

Using these techniques to analyse a malware zoo collected from sources such as Virus Watch, Barr was able to achieve a 95.7% accuracy rate. He believes that although this technique isn’t suitable for contemporary desktop anti-virus software, it opens a new front in the malware detection arms race. Still, Barr is aware that malware writers will rapidly develop countermeasures and his group is already investigating counter-countermeasures.

Malware writers have three avenues for blocking detection: injecting new content that looks benign; encryption; and obfuscation. Adding new content threatens the malware’s viability: raising the NCD by 50% requires doubling the size of the malware. Encryption can be used against the malware writer: applying a language model across the program reveals a distinctive saw-toothed pattern of regions with low surprise and low entropy alternating with regions of high surprise and high entropy (that is, regions with ciphertext). Obfuscation is still under study: the group is using three obfuscation engines available for Java and applying them repeatedly to Java malware. Measuring the NCD after each application shows that after 100 iterations the NCD approaches 1 (that is, the two items being compared are dissimilar), but that two of the three engines make errors after 200 applications. Unfortunately for malware writers, this technique also causes the program to grow in size. The cost of obfuscation to malware writers may therefore be greater than that imposed upon white hats.

Continue reading ACE-CSR opening event 2015/16: talks on malware, location privacy and wiretap law