Annual Review 2015-16 - [email protected]/publications_files/pdfs/CERC_Annual_Report_2015-16.pdf · Accepted at IEEE Signal Processing Letters (IEEE SPL), 2015. Sachdeva,

Annual Review

2015-16

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Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre1

Message from DirectorIIIT-Delhi

It is a pleasure to see the growth and success of CERC as it completes 2 years. I am happy to see the faculty and students making consis-tent progress in various aspects of cybersecu-rity and contribute to the growth of the area in the country. I am particularly pleased to seeIIITD now being part of national level projects on security, like the Information Security Education and Awareness program (ISEA) phase II.

I am confident that our faculty and students will continue making progress and make CERC a leading center for Cybersecurity globally.

Prof. Pankaj Jalote


Message from Founding HeadCERC

Greetings! CERC completes two years on 23rd Jan 2016. I am thrilled to see the excite-ment around the topic in the country and how we are contributing to the same.

This year one of our biggest accomplishment was to become part of the Information Securi-ty Education and Awareness (ISEA) program, Phase II. This is a Government of India initia-tive with about 50+ institutes involved, and a total budget of close to 100 crores rupees for 5 years. We hope to use this project as a vehicle to make some long lasting and useful contributions to the Indian Information Security eco system. This year, we graduated one Ph.D. student, three Masters students and many undergrad-uates worked with our faculty throughout this year. We added 2 core faculty to our strong list of faculty – Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi is a well-known figure in Indian academics, he is taking a 2 year sabbatical with us and Prof. Puneet Goyal, B.Tech. and M.Tech. from IIT Delhi and Ph.D. from Purdue University, USA. With this addition, we are 7 core faculty, all holding Ph.Ds from eminent universities. We also continue to have 3 adjunct faculty (all having Ph.Ds.). Currently, we have 10 Ph.D. students, 4 Masters students, 2 Research Associates, and 10 UG students working with us. We also have an Admin Assistant, who provides amazing administrative support to the Centre. The Centre continues to be one of the largest groups in the country focused on cybersecurity.

We have been getting continued support from all stakeholders of cybersecurity in the country and around the world. We had numerous visits by different stakeholders, to mention a few, Prof. Anwitaman Datta from Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Vice Mayor and his delegation from Hague, the Netherlands, Prof. Mustaque Ahamad

from Georgia Tech, etc. Our research work has been published in multiple conferences, and workshops – Foundations of Software Engi-neering (FSE), IEEE conference on Image Processing, Privacy Security and Trust (PST), Hypertext, European Conference on Com-puter Supported Cooperative work (ECSCW), and Digital Government. Multiple plugins, Technologies built by CERC are currently being used by people around the world and some government agencies in the country (Clotho, TweetCred, Facebook Inspector), and some government agencies in the country. Our faculty have spoken in multiple training programs outside the campus. CERC currently has funding from Government of India and the industry.

All in all, we had a roller coaster year at CERC. We continue to march in the direction where we are making meaningful contributions to the 4 mission statements of CERC.

I sincerely thank Mr. Kiran Karnik (Chariman, BoG), Members of the Board of Governance for their continued support and encourage-ment. I am highly obliged to Prof. Pankaj Jalote for his excitement around CERC; I have been drawing a lot of ideas from the Advisory Board of CERC, a special thanks to each of them. Finally, I thank all stakeholders who are contributing to our growth and all faculty, students, present and past, who make us proud.

Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru “PK”


About CERCMission

Build systems and tools that are of direct interest to different stakeholders (govern-ment, industry, citizens).

Create a pipeline for Undergraduate, Masters, and Ph.D. students working in related areas.

Conduct high-end technical training on cyber-security for Government of India officials and corporations in topics such as secure coding, protecting critical infrastructure, privacy and security in online social media, and so on.

Create awareness among public about cyber-security and privacy in India.


Security, trust, and privacy of distributed systems: Networks play a very important role in Computer Science; the Internet and the World Wide Web are not only essential for functioning in modern society, but in fact provide a platform for new networks, such as peer-to-peer and social networks. The study of the rights and privileges of multiple users of a complex shared system, such as a network, is a very important. We focus on developing a solid understanding of a few closely related areas, as follows: Network policies, such as firewalls, and the irdesign and verification; Network tracing, i.e.topology reconstruction of networks; Design and analysis of secure network protocols; The interaction of agents in a network.

Privacy & Anonymity: Our interest is in exploring and studying attacks in low latency anonymity preserving networks, defenses against them and ways to identify potential adversaries. Location based Privacy issues is another area of our interest. This area also overlaps with Network Anonymity, Privacy, and Network Security.

Software security: Program analysis tech-niques have been employed in the past to ensure that programs do not violate safety properties. More recently, there has been a growing interest in the development of analy-sis techniques to address issues related to software security. Security properties and features often evolve with the software and the analysis techniques need to be efficient as well as adaptive to the changing environment and requirements. Dynamic program analysis is particularly attractive due to its high preci-sion, scalability and adaptability.

Multimedia security: Digital Multimedia Signal Processing for Multimedia Security and Forensics can function as a source of intelli-gence in establishing the authenticity of a test media. Images/Videos captured by CCTV or other devices are often used for investigations as well as evidences in a court of law in India. These CCTV videos/images can be used to identify perpetrators of the crime. Digital media forensics is also useful under broad-casting scenarios as well as social media infor-mation sharing. As digital media can be easily altered for many reasons, identification of fake media can reduce the biased social and politi-cal outlook in the society.

Policy issues of cybersecurity: Our interest is in studying the effects of security and privacy policies on technology and people. We are also interested in studying the techno-legal effects of security and privacy. Our interest is in understanding the security and privacy perceptions of Indian citizens.

Privacy & security in complex systems: With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Inter-net is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security on online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. Our work derives techniques from Data Mining, Text Mining, Statistics, Network Science, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Complex networks.

Research Topics


Research Grants

Design and Development of Multimedia Forg-ery Detection System. A V Subramanyam. Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India. 2014 - 2017.

Information Security Education and Aware-ness (ISEA) Project. Department of Electron-ics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India. 2015-2020.

Analyzing and Measuring Trustworthiness of User-Generated Content and Users on Multiple Online Social Media to Counter Cybercrime. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Government of India. 2013 - 2015.

Creating course content for Privacy and Secu-rity in Online Social Media. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. Intel. 2014 - 2015.

SNA and OSI Analysis of DRDO: Mechanisms, Impact, and Scenario Analysis. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. Defence Research and Develop-ment Organisation (DRDO), Government of India. Started in Sept 2015. 18 month project.

Cryptolock malware prevention using behav-ior analysis. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. RSA, The Security Division of EMC. Started in Sept 2015. 12 month project.

Techniques Developed / DeployedClotho: Saving Programs from Malformed Strings and Incorrect String-handling.

AASMA: Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics. Deployed in 25 state and federal govern-ment agencies in India.

Facebook Inspector (FbI): Browser plug-in for real-time detection of potentially malicious posts on Facebook during real-world events.

AwardsDr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru (“PK”) received Adobe Research Excellence Award for 2013 - 2016.

Best Paper Award. Aggarwal, A., Kumaraguru, P. What They Do in Shadows: Twitter Under-ground Follower Market 13th International conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust. July 23, 2015.

Best Paper Award. Sachdeva, N., Kumaraguru, P. Social Networks for Police and Residents in India: Exploring Online Communication for Crime Prevention 16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. May 27-30, 2015.


Aggarwal, A., Kumaraguru, P. What They Do in Shadows: Twitter Underground Follower Market. Accept-ed at the 13th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2015.

Dewan, P., Kumaraguru, P. Towards Automatic Real Time Identification of Malicious Posts onFacebook. Accepted at the 13th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), 2015.

Dhar, A., Purandare, R., Dhawan, M., Rangaswamy, S. Clotho:Saving Programs from Malformed Strings and Incorrect String-handling. Accepted at Foundations of Software Engineering, 2015.

Jain, P., Kumaraguru, P., Joshi, A. Other Times, Other Values: Leveraging Attribute History to Link User Profiles across Online Social Networks. Accepted at Hypertext, 2015.

Ravi, H., Subramanyam, A. V., Emmanuel S. Spatial Domain Quantization Noise Based Image FIltering Detection. Accepted at the IEEE International conference on Image Processing, 2015.

Ravi, H., Subramanyam, A. V., Emmanuel, S., Forensic Analysis of Linear and Non Linear Image Filtering Using Quantization Noise. Accepted at ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communication and Applications (ACM TOMM), 2015

Ravi, H., Subramanyam, A. V., Emmanuel, S., ACE - An Effective Anti-Forensic Contrast Enhancement Technique. Accepted at IEEE Signal Processing Letters (IEEE SPL), 2015.

Sachdeva, N., and Kumaraguru, P. Online Social Networks and Police in India - Understandingthe Percep-tions, Behavior, Challenges. Accepted at the European conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), 2015.

Sachdeva, N., and Kumaraguru, P. Social Networks for Police and Residents in India: Exploring Online Communication for Crime Prevention. Accepted at the16th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o), 2015.

Courses TaughtCSE350/CSE550 Network Security

CSE749 Network Anonymity and Privacy

CSE648 Privacy and Security in Online Social Media

CSE503 Program Analysis

CSE500 Secure Coding

CSE530 Distributed Systems

CSE3SE/5SE Security Engineering

CSE3PP Practice of Programing

CSE694F Multimedia Security

PublicationsPeer Reviewed


Dr. Rahul Purandare visited University of Nebraska, USA. May-July, 2015

Dr. A V Subramanyam visited The University of Maryland, USA. May - July, 2015

Internships

Faculty Visits

Ambuj Mehrish, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Jan - July, 2016

Megha Arora, EMC, Bangalore, Jan - May, 2015

Rohan Katyal, EMC, Bangalore, Jan -May, 2015

VisitorsDr. Anwitaman Datta, School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, 18 December, 2015

Prof. Mustaque Ahamad, GaTech, 10 April, 2015

Vice Mayor of Hague, visited with a delegation of 15+ members, Neteherlands, October 14, 2015

Mr. Vijay Jagadam, SPEC Engineering College, Hyderabad, September 9, 2015


Ph.D. Thesis

Masters Thesis

Aditi GuptaDesigning and Evaluating Techniques to Mitigate Misinformation Spread on Microblogging Web Services.Ph.D. July 6, 2015

Shobhita SaxenaVideo Inpainting Detection Using Inconsistencies in Optical Flow.M.Tech. (CSE). July 29, 2015

Rahul Kumar SinghTasveer : Tomography of India’s Internet Infrastructure.M.Tech. (CSE). July 28, 2015

Vaishali GargNovel Instruction Set Architecture Based Side Channels in popular SSL/TLS Implementations.M.Tech. (Information Security). June 19, 2015



Collaborators


Activities

Regular Events

TechTalksDate: October 16, 2015Speaker: Dr. Eric Bodden, Technische Universität Darmstadt Title: No more Shortcuts: Towards faithful and Efficient Java Access Control

Seminar SeriesDate:18 December, 2015Speaker: Dr. Anwitaman Datta, School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), SingaporeTitle: Small Pieces from The Big Data Puzzle

Date: April 10, 2015Speaker: Prof. Mustaque Ahamad, GaTechTitle: Growing Attack Surface: Understanding and Mitigating Cross-Channel Cyber Threats

Reading Group SessionsDate: May 13, 2015Lead: Tarun VermaTitle: Hacking Blind: Blind Return Oriented Programming

Date: April 15, 2015Lead: Mridul Malpotra Title: Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system

Date: April 8, 2015Lead: Sambuddho ChakravartyTitle: Mind Your Blocks: On the Stealthiness of Malicious BGP Hijacks

Date: April 1, 2015Lead: Shariq Murtuza Title: DSCRETE: Automatic Rendering of Forensic Information from Memory Images via Application Logic Reuse


Oct 7 - 8, 2015: Master Trainers’ Program. Staying Safe Online for School Teachers

May 2, 2015: Workshop for School Teachers on Strategies for Safe and Effective Use of Online Social Media

April 9 - 10, 2015: Second Global Cybersecurity Leaders Program. Prof. Mustaque Ahamad, Georgia Tech

Mar 12 – 1, 2015: Mobile Security Programme, Mr. Felix Mohan, CISO Academy

Feb 18 - 20, 2015: Cyber Secrurity & Network Security, Ministry of Defence

Feb 13 - 14, 2015: Security & Privacy Symposium

Feb 2 - 4, 2015: Workshop on Online Social Media Policy

Special Events


CERC in Media

Oct 8, 2015: Economic Times, “Twitter Handles Facebook Pages of Police Departments in a Sorry State”http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/twitter-han-dles-facebook-pages-of-police-departments-in-a-sorry-state/articleshow/49265208.cms

Jul 21 2015: Livemint,” Stay Safe Online”http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/Vj5mBeU3thtM8FlrxvsxsO/Stay-safe-online.html

Jul 20, 2015: Times of India, “IPS officers with medical, engineering degrees are changing the face of policing”http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/IPS-officers-with-me-dical-engineering-degrees-are-changing-the-face-of-policing/articleshow/48137820.cms

Jul 7, 2015: BBC New, “What makes a tweet believable”http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33365782

June 08, 2015: The Economic Times, “Study on City Police's Social Media Use Bags US Varsity Award”http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31815&ar-ticlexml=Study-on-City-Polices-Social-Media-Use-Bags-08062015002035


Testimonials

It’s one of the unique centres of the country and they have shown how high quality research with signifi-cant amount of quantity could be done in one year. I’m sure such centres are needed for the country and this centre would guide the rest of the nation in maintaining the quality and the quantity in years to come in the area of Informa-tion Security.

Prof. N. BalakrishnanProfessor

Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

I was very excited to hear about the centre and glad to see it completed it’s 1st anniversary and certainly cyber security is going to be very important component of society well into the future and it’s a good thing that India is building a strong founda-tion in that.

Prof. Ravi SandhuProfessor

University of Texas, San AntonioExecutive Director and Chief Scientist,

Institute for Cyber Security (ICS)

I see that CERC has an excel-lent and big role to play in this scenario because not only they can train and educate people and sort of help our country build skilled resource in cyber security but at the same time the kind of research they are trying to carry out is going to provide new methods and new technology that will help us meet the goal and challenges of cyber security.

Dr. Sachin LodhaPrincipal Scientist

Tata Consultancy Services, India

CERC at IIITD is a milestone in the history of cyber security strategy of the nation, being the very first institu-tion that was set up under the national cyber security policy that was set up by the government. Other organisations are trying to follow in the footsteps of IIITD’s CERC. Overall CERC is on the path that many others will strive to follow.

Mr. Felix MohanCo-Founder

CISO Academy


Members

Core Faculty

Dr. Hrishikesh B. AcharyaPh.D., University of Texas at Austin, USAAreas of interest: Security and scalability of networks and distributed systems; protocol design and verification; real-time, robust and adaptive systems; security and privacy in various networks; concurrent and parallel systems.

Dr. Sambuddho Chakravarty Ph.D., Columbia University, USAAreas of interest: Network anonymity and privacy, network surveillance and counter surveillance, network and systems security in general.

Dr. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, "PK"Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, USAAreas of interest: Privacy and security in online social media (PSOSM), cyber crime, privacy, and usable security.

Dr. Rahul Purandare Ph.D., University of Nebraska – Lincoln, USAAreas of interest: Software engineering, program analysis, software security, automatic program repair, specification mining.

Dr. A. V. Subramanyam Ph.D., Nanyang Technological University, SingaporeAreas of interest: Information hiding, digital multimedia forensics, multimedia signal processing.

Dr. Dheeraj SanghiPh.D. from University of Maryland, College Park, USA Areas of interest: Networking - Protocols and Security.

Dr. Puneet Goyal Ph.D., Purdue University, USAAreas of interest: Image Processing, Security and Forensics, Analytics


Admin Assistant

Pooja Sagar

Affiliated Faculty

Vikram GoyalPh.D., IIT Delhi, IndiaAreas of Interest: Databases, Data Privacy and Security

Dr. Mohan Dhawan Ph.D., Rutgers UniversityAreas of interest: Network anonymity and privacy, network surveillance and counter surveillance, network and systems security in general.

Prof. Anupam Joshi Ph.D., Purdue UniversityAreas of interest: Pervasive, mobile, sensor and networked computing, semantic web, web mining and personalization, policies, security, trust, and privacy in open distributed systems, distributed aI, neuro-fuzzy systems, learning and adaptation, HPCC. On sabbatical, June 2014 - June 2015.

Adjunct / Visiting Faculty

Dr. Sanjay BahlPh.D., Indian Institute of Foreign TradeAreas of interest: Cyber security policy, cyber security international cooperation, trust, information security management, risk management, information security governance, information security service quality, cyber security education, train-ing and awareness.

Core Students

Anupama AggarwalPh.D. Scholar

Prateek DewanPh.D. Scholar


Niharika SachdevaPh.D. Scholar

Devashish GosainPh.D. Scholar

Paridhi JainPh.D. Scholar

Rishabh KaushalPh.D. Scholar

Mridul MalpotraB.Tech. Student

Rohan KatyalB.Tech. Student

Anindya SrivastavaM.Tech. Student

Megha AroraB.Tech. Student

Dhriti KhannaPh.D. Scholar

Ambuj MehrishPh.D. Scholar

Anuj Shanker SaxenaPh.D. Scholar

Sonal GoelM.Tech. Student

Anshika AgarwalM.Tech. Student

Pradyumn NandM.Tech. Student

Ajit Pratap SinghM.Tech Student

Srishti GuptaPh.D. Scholar


Associates

Hareesh Ravi B.E in Instrumentationand Control Engineering.Sri Sai Ram Engineering collegeaffiliated to Anna University

Yatharth SharmaB.E. Jaypee Institute ofinformation Technology, Delhi

R. Gandeevan B.E. College of EngineeringGuindy, Chennai

Alumni

Aritra DharM.Tech. Student

Vaishali GargM.Tech. Student

Shivam ChaturvediM.Tech. Student

Aditi GuptaPh.D. Scholar

Suresh RangaswamyM.Tech. Student

Shobhita SaxenaM.Tech. Student

Rahul Kumar SinghM.Tech. Student

Rekha TokasM.Tech Student

Nilaksh DasAssociate

Dushyant DhyaniB.E. NIT, Kurukshetra

Sameer Sawhney Project Manager, Aricent


Advisory Board

Dr. Mustaque Ahamad Professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a global professor of engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi

Ms. Anuradha Das MathurFounder and Director of 9.9 Media (Nine Dot Nine Media)

Mr. Felix MohanCo-Founder, CISO academy

Prof. Rajat MoonaDirector General of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)

Dr. Sundeep OberoiGlobal Head for Niche Technology Delivery Group in TCS

Dr. Gulshan RaiNational Cyber Security Coordinator, Government of India

Mr. Nandkumar Saravade CEO, Data Security Council of India


Mr. B. Ganapathi SubramaniamThe Chief Security Officer for Flipkart

Dr. Niranjan Thirumale Vice President, VMware & Managing Director of VMware India R&D

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and the Exec-utive Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) at The University of Texas at Dallas

Mr. Sunil Varkey CISO and Global Head of Information Risk & Policy Compliance for Wipro


Cybersecurity Education and Research Centre A-404, Academic BuildingIIIT-DelhiOkhla Industrial Estate, Phase III(Near Govind Puri Metro Station)New Delhi, India - 110020

P: 91-11-26907596 F: 91-11-26907405

E: [email protected] W: cerc.iiitd.ac.in

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Documents

Annual Review 2015-16 - [email protected]/publications_files/pdfs/CERC_Annual_Report_2015-16.pdf · Accepted at IEEE Signal Processing Letters (IEEE SPL), 2015. Sachdeva,