USC Information Sciences Institute, Google, & Microsoft Research Sponsor GREPSEC 2 – An NSF and CRA-W/CDC Supported Workshop for Women & Underrepresented Groups interested in Computer Security Research

The second GREPSEC workshop was recently held in San Jose, California, May 16-17, at The Sainte Claire Hotel. The event was very successful and included forty students from thirty universities. The day-and-a-half workshop preceded the annual IEEE S&P (Security and Privacy) Symposium.

This week NIST held a workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) testbeds. While the development of CPS testbeds is still in the early stages, this workshop was presented as an opportunity to bring a diverse spectrum of the CPS and testbed communities together, to talk about key capabilities that CPS testbeds should have and the design principles that make them possible.

As previously announced in early July, we now have an enhancement to our DETER federation daemon, fedd, which is version 4.10. This release includes a new desktop federator VM image based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, a more portable version of the python topdl library, and a workaround for a command line parsing bug in recent versions of ssh. It is interoperable with older versions of fedd, so users are only required to upgrade if they have difficulties with recent ssh installations.

The topdl library and VM image can be installed independently.

I am here in Washington D.C. preparing for the Smart America Challenge Expo.  Our team - the Smart Energy Cyber-Physical Systems – will be demonstrating an integrated federated cyber physical testbed for experimentation and analysis for improving efficiency and resiliency, as well as protecting the crucial resource from potential terrorist attacks.

I attended the 20th NASPI Working Group meeting in Knoxville, TN on March 11-12, 2014. The NASPI Working Group is a voluntary organization of electric power engineers, technical managers in power-related corporations, vendors of products supporting power transmission, and academics in the power field.

Several key members of the DETER Project team – myself (Terry Benzel), Steve Schwab, and Ted Faber – traveled to Israel to work with the Israeli National Cyber Bureau (INCB) under a bi-lateral agreement between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the INCB. Additionally, we took with us two DeterLab 'power users' from our DETER community – Sandy Clark, University of Pennsylvania and Ryan Goodfellow, Washington State University – to be a part of this exciting opportunity. DHS was represented by Dr.

PBS NOVA host David Pogue and a film crew visited USC ISI to learn more about cyber security and the DETER Project. As a result of this visit, PBS NOVA is now hosting a featurette about the DETER Project on their web site as part of their ongoing web presence, complimenting their television series Making Stuff Safer.

I had the opportunity to discuss with David the current threat environment and how DeterLab contributes to improving Cyber Security through experimental science of cyber security.

I had the opportunity to participate in the DHS S&T Cyber Security Division Principal Investigators' Meeting in Washington D.C., September 16th thru 18th. The meeting had over 200 attendees, including researchers working in a wide range of research topics: Digital Provenance, Software Assurance, Security Metrics, Identity Management, Insider Threat, Cyber Forensics, Usable Security, and Network Mapping & Measurement.

Networking testbeds provide a predictable and repeatable environment where an experimenter has full control over the underlying nodes.