January 2019 Newsletter
A Message From The Director
Hello and Happy New Year FICS Research Community,
We are thrilled to share that we begin 2019 with a lot of great news to announce!
Just as 2018 was overall eventful and auspicious to the growth of the institute – filled with several faculty and student accolades, newsworthy and timely research, collaborations, inventions, discoveries, and publications news, as well as the establishment of many new partnerships with industry and government collaborators and sponsors – 2019 already seems to be following closely in its footsteps.
Indeed, FICS Research begins 2019 with a new Associate Director, Dr. Kevin Butler, three faculty hires (Drs. Byron Williams , Vincent Bindschaedler and Farimah Farahmandi ), a larger and more diverse student body, as well as new additions to our bustling SeCurity and AssuraNce (SCAN) Lab (the PHEMOS-100 and Summit Probe Station) and course offerings, along with a few other faculty awards.
Below we share some of the other exciting news we have accumulated to date.
Throughout the coming year, we not only look forward to sharing more about our events, endeavors, and achievements, but also, especially, to keeping in touch with you all.
It is our hope that this new year will provide you all with as many new opportunities, growth, lessons, achievements, and partnerships as we at FICS Research will be striving for.
Yours Sincerely,
Mark Tehranipoor
2019 Young Investigators Award recipient
Fatemeh Ganhi, Domenic Forte, and Jean-Pierre Seifert
We are proud to announce that FICS Research Professor Yier Jin is a recipient of a 2019 Young Investigators Award (YIP) from @USNavyResearch.
These highly competitive awards recognize early-career researchers whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise in helping to meet naval war-fighting challenges. Dr. Jin’s research, entitled “On-Chip Intelligent Sensor Based Real-Time Analog Detection Framework for Microprocessor Trustworthiness”, is recognized in the area of Cyber Security and Complex Software Systems.
To learn more about other 2019 Young Investigators Award recipients, go to > https://www.onr.navy.mil/Science-Technology/Directorates/office-research-discovery-invention/Sponsored-Research/YIP/2019-young-investigators
Google Security and Privacy Research Award recipient
FICS Research is proud to announce that it’s Director of Diversity, Professor Daniela Oliveira, is the recipient of a Google Security and Privacy Research Award. The award, which is a $100,000 unrestricted monetary gift, was granted to Dr. Oliveira in recognition of her significant, recent contributions to research pertaining to protecting users across the Internet. Google specifically recognized Oliveira’s work in the areas of social engineering and phishing. The intent of the award is to further support her research in these areas.
Google recently released further details about the program and the awardees. The award program is relatively new, having begun as a pilot program in 2016. The recipients are selected via internal internal Google nominations and voting.
More information about the winners and the program are available on the Google Online Security Blog.
2019 FICS Research Conference on Cybersecurity
The 2019 FICS Research Conference on Cybersecurity
will be held in the Grand Ballroom of the University of Florida’s Reitz Union
on Monday, March 11th, and Tuesday, March 12th, 2019.
Registration is now open.
Space is limited, so secure your spot today.
For more information regarding speakers, accommodations, and parking, please peruse our conference pages: https://fics.institute.ufl.edu/conference/
Additionally, sponsorship opportunities for this event are still available.
To learn more about the different possible tiers and their accompanying perks, visit our sponsorship page:
http://reg.conferences.dce.ufl.edu/Basic/1400071362
We hope to see you there!
September 2019
Major News
UF FICS Research and Ohios State Lead the Way in Establishing Two New Centers of Excellence on Hardware Security
Several FICS Research Faculty -including Director Mark Tehranipoor, Associate Director Kevin Butler, and Professors Domenic Forte and Jier Jin – joined forces with Professor Waleed Khalil and other colleagues at OSU to form two Centers of Excellence (COEs) sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and Nimbis Inc., a developer of collaborative cloud communities: The Center for Enabling Cyber Defense in Analog and Mixed Signal Domain (CYAN) and the MicroElectronics Security Training Center (MEST).
Professor Shrimpton & Team Selected for
DARPA RACE Program
Join us in congratulating Prof.Tom Shrimpton and Co-PIs, Drs. Vincent Bindschaedler and Patrick Traynor for being selected to participate in DARPA’s RACE Program. The 1.5 million dollar research grant they received for this project will enable them to contribute their expertise in cryptographic and obfuscated communication protocols to research technologies for an attack-resistant mobile communication system that can completely reside within a network environment, as well as to create advances in communication protocol encapsulation methods.
To learn more about Dr. Shrimpton and his research, visit his homepage and check out this faculty spotlight feature we published last year.
Analog Devices Sponsors
FICS Research Distinguished Speaker Series
We are thrilled to share that Analog Devices, Inc (ADI) has generously gifted FICS Research with a fund to support our Distinguished Speaker Series. The series, which aims to attract high profile speakers to the Institute at the University of Florida both for the benefit of the campus community as well as potential collaboration opportunities, has to date spotlighted hosted speakers such as a Program Manager from DARPA, a Deputy Cyber Security Advisor at the National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST), and a Senior Engineer and IEEE Fellow from Intel.
Thanks to ADI Inc.’s sponsorship, we look forward to sharing announcements about more exciting upcoming speakers in this series. Stay tuned!
Technology Highlights
Failure Analysis for Hardware Assurance and Security
A comprehensive study of different physical inspection/attacks , the prospect and challenges of physical inspection methods as an emerging trust verification tool, and the dire threat imposed by physical attacks on systems on chip.
M. Tanjidur Rahman and Navid Asadi
Events
2019 TAME Forum @ University of Florida
The 2nd bi-annual Trusted and Assured MicroElectronics (TAME) Forum will be held on Tuesday, December 10th, at the University of Florida‘s Reitz Union Grand Ballroom.
Registration and sponsorship opportunities are now available.
Check out the Program to get a sneak peek of this year’s invited speakers and read up about the first ever De-Obfuscation Challenge, sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), that will also be hosted at the event.
Faculty Highlight
Farimah Farahmandi
Dr. Farimah Farahmandi is the newest addition to the FICS Research team. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida.
Her research interests include computer-aided design for hardware security, formal verification, and post-silicon validation and debug. Her research has resulted in two books, seven book chapters, and several publications in premier ACM/IEEE journals and conferences. Her research has been sponsored by SRC, AFRL, DARPA, and Cisco, as well as recognized by several awards including best paper nomination for IEEE ASPDAC 2017.
Student Spotlight
FICS Research Students present @ SOUPS 2019 USENIX Security Symposium
Doctoral student, Imani Sherman, presents a poster about her research on user responses to anti-robocall applications at the 15th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), which was co-located with the 2019/ 28th Annual USENIX Security Symposium in Santa Clara, CA earlier this year.