A DETERLab delegation – led by DETER principal investigator Terry Benzel along with members of the DETER Team Steve Schwab and Goran Scuric – attended and participated in CYBER WEEK 2016 at Tel Aviv University, Israel. The CYBER WEEK conference that took place June 19th thru 23rd was organized jointly by the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC), the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security, the Israeli National Cyber Bureau, Prime Minister's Office and Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The event brought together participants from all over the world – policy-makers, cyber experts, industry professionals, academics, researchers, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and security officials – for knowledge sharing on methods and dilemmas in defending critical national infrastructure to future-thinking ideas to solve concerns in the cyber field.
The DETER Team attended the Academic Perspective on Cybersecurity Challenges as part of Day 1 of CYBER WEEK. This provided an opportunity for the team to hear from leading academic researchers from both US and Israeli institutions to delve in to the more difficult aspects of research challenges. The DETER Team brought up several topics to the perspective presenters ranging from approaches in cyber experimentation to how to best contribute back to security research and experiment lab platforms.
CYBER WEEK officially kicked off on June 20th with key presentations from the Israeli government and US Department of Homeland Security. Alejandro N. Mayorkas, US Homeland Security Deputy Secretary, announced a new initiative in information sharing between the United States and Israel governments. Dr. Doug Maughan, CSD Division Director for the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency at S&T, described some of the interesting research programs that he oversees as well as announcing the new DHS S&T Silicon Valley Office in California.
In addition to the formal CYBER WEEK activities, a special CREATE1 / DETERLab Users Forum was held in parallel on June 21st that was hosted by the Inter-University Computation Center (IUCC). It brought together the DETER Team delegation with Israel’s CREATE Lab Team to discuss their respective lab system updates and use cases with their invited user community from academia and industry. The User Forum was a great benefit to all in attendance as the open discussion setting allowed for candid conversations on what was working well and not so well, and what was missing, for users of DETERLab and CREATE. During this forum Steve Schwab presented several key DETERLab uses cases that included large scale cyber security experiments – involving power grid and network attack simulations – as well as capture-the-flag student training in DETER Education.
On June 22nd, Terry Benzel participated in the CYBER WEEK Technology Track presentations. She gave a presentation on “The Science of Cyber Security Experimentation: The DETER Project.” This presentation explained what the DETER project is and its future efforts around Cyber Experimentation of the Future (CEF), including the motivations for science based cyber experimentation. In addition to the CYBER WEEK activities and User Forum, the DETER Team spent time working closely with the CREATE Team to explore operational challenges and to develop plans for joint development of new lab capabilities to better serve the research community.
Both DETERLab and CREATE lab are open and free to use, via an application process, for cyber security experimentation research and education training. To learn more, click on DETERLab and CREATE. Users in Israel are strongly encouraged to make use of the CREATE resource that is supported by the Cyber Security team at IUCC as part of a collaboration with the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.
For a related article from the CREATE Team / IUCC, click on: User Forum.
Pictured: Trojan horse made of electronic hardware components at Tel Aviv University (location of Cyber Week 2016). A wooden trojan horse in Greek mythology was used to conceal a Greek army inside in order to enter Troy undetected to win the war. In computing it represents a program used to infiltrate the security of a computer system to perform malicious activity all the while seeming benign or beneficial to its unsuspecting users.
1 CREATE is Israel's own iteration of DETERLab that is often referred to as a DETER cluster or mini-bed.
