2024 CAE-R Research Symposium

CAE Community of Practice
Cyber Research

2024 CAE-R Research Symposium

The 2024 CAE-R CoP Research Symposium was held at Marriott St. Louis Grand, on Thursday, October 10, 2024, as part of the National Cybersecurity Education Colloquium. The goals of the symposium are to (1) further establish the CAE-R as a community of practice, (2) build a community that involves PhD students, and (3) showcase the excellent research done at CAE-R designated institutions. The symposium will be attended by representatives from CAE-R schools as well as invited government employees.

Program Co-Chairs

Roberto Perdisci, University of Georgia
Gabriela Ciocarlie, University of Texas at San Antonio

Program Committee Members

Elisa Bertino, Purdue University
Guofei Gu, Texas A&M University
Alina Oprea, Northeastern University
Manuel Egele, Boston University
Mark Boutwell, National Security Agency

2024 CAE-R Symposium Program Elements

PhD Candidates Presentations. Initiated in 2023, the CAE-R Symposium continued to provide a unique opportunity to both (a) showcase outstanding PhD students from CAE-R institutions and (b) identify and connect them with potential future faculty hires. A small set of senior PhD students was selected to give a short oral presentation of their research spanning the last few years. Think of this as an opportunity for them to give a preview of their dissertations to a large audience of faculty from CAE-R institutions and representatives from various government agencies. Students were selected based on diversity of research areas and representation of a variety of CAE-R institutions.

Research Highlights Posters. With the goal of fostering awareness and collaboration between CAE-R institutions and showcase the research to government representatives, the program included a Research Highlights Poster Session to feature papers that have been recently published. Most posters were presented by PhD students, but faculty poster presentations were also present. We encourage CAE-R PoCs to nominate up to three research papers in cybersecurity from their institution that have appeared (or will appear) in a 2023 or 2024 cybersecurity research conference.

Research Funding Agency Panel. The program included a panel of program managers from various funding agencies discussing funding opportunities.

Panel with Former Program Managers. The program included a panel where former Program Managers who are now part of academia shared insights on how to prepare a successful funding proposal.

Keynote Presentations. The program included 2 keynote presentations, one from academia and one from the government.

INSuRE+C Research Talks. The program included 4 talks from INSuRE+C funded projects.

Timeslot

Event

8.00 – 8.30am CT

Networking Breakfast

8.30 – 8.40am CT

Welcome Remarks

Tony Coulson – CAE Community/Cal State San Bernardino

8.40 – 8.50am CT

Introductory Remarks on the CAE-R Program

Dee Dee Patterson – CAE PMO

8.50 – 9.00am CT

Program Committee Co-Chairs' Remarks

Roberto Perdisci – University of Georgia

Gabriela Ciocarlie – University of Texas at San Antonio

9.00 – 9.45am CT

Government Research Keynote

Brad Martin – National Security Agency

9.45 – 10.30am CT

Research Funding Opportunities with Federal Funding Agencies Panel

Diba Hadi – Principal Director, DOD CIO Cyber Academic Engagement Office

Michael Pozmantier – NSF

Karen Karavanic – NSF

10.30 –10.45am CT

Break

10.45 – 11.45am CT

PhD Candidates' Dissertation Overview Presentations

Robert Lois – PhD Candidate, University of Pittsburgh

Debopriya Dipta – PhD Candidate, Iowa State University

Sharmin Aktar – PhD Candidate, University of New Orleans

Lorenzo Neil – PhD Candidate, North Carolina State University

Clement Fung – PhD Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University

Raymond Muller – PhD Candidate, Purdue University

11.45 – 12.00pm CT

INSuRE+C Talk - Using AI to Improve the Development of Security Protocols

Martin Duclos – Mississippi State University

Ivan Fernandez – Mississippi State University

Kaneesha Moore – Mississippi State University

12.00 – 12.15pm CT

INSuRE+C Talk - Post-Quantum Cryptography on Constrained Networks

William Joslin – Rochester Institute of Technology

Geoff Twardokus – Rochester Institute of Technology

12.15 – 1.45pm CT

Lunch and Research Posters Presentations

1.45 – 2.30pm CT

Academia Research Keynote

Cristina Nita-Rotaru – Northeastern University

2.30 – 3.15pm CT

Insights for Successful Funding Proposals from ex-PMs with Faculty Experience Panel

Angelos Keromytis – Georgia Tech

Sukarno Mertoguno – Georgia Tech

Indrajit Ray – Colorado State University

3.15 – 3.30pm CT

Break

3.30 – 3.45pm CT

INSuRE+C Talk - CARdea: Enhancing C-V2X Anomaly Detection within the VEINS Framework

Teja Guruvelli – Clemson University

3.45 – 4.00pm CT

INSuRE+C Talk - A Digital Cybersecurity Advisor for the Power Industry Built on Open Source Large Language Foundation Models

Rodney Frazier – Rochester Institute of Technology

Zachary Lightcap – Rochester Institute of Technology

Grace Long Torales – Rochester Institute of Technology

4.00 – 4.15pm CT

Report on Special Topic Workshop Outcomes

Kun Sun – George Mason University

Rebecca McWhite – National Institute of Standards and Technology

William Enck – North Carolina State University

4.15 – 4.30pm CT

CAE-R Discussion and Reflections

Presenters are bolded.

*The poster covers work carried out in the context of the INSuRE program.
**The PhD student has also presented this work during the PhD panels.

A Cybersecurity Summer Camp for High School Students Using Autonomous R/C Cars

Myounggyu Won, Luke Rivers Carrington, Douglas Manuel Espinoza, Mohd Hasan Ali, Dipankar Dasgupta (University of Memphis).

*A Survey of ROV++: We May Need Another Napkin

Nathan Ferrell, Bryan Chan, Henry Schmidt, Arrianna Szymczak, Berk Gulmezoglu (Iowa State University). Government Problem Mentor Neal Ziring (National Security Agency).

Poster

*Ain’t How You Deploy: An Analysis of BGP Security Policies Performance Against Various Attack Scenarios with Differing Deployment Strategies

Seth Barrett, Calvin Idom, German Zavala Villafuerte, Andrew Byers, Berk Gulmezoglu (Iowa State University). Government Problem Mentor Neal Ziring (National Security Agency).

Bridging the Protection Gap: Innovative Approaches to Shield Older Adults from AI-Enhanced Scams

LD Herrera, London Van Sickle, Ashley Podhradsky (Dakota State University).

Poster

CAV-AD: A Robust Framework for Detection of Anomalous Data and Malicious Sensors in CAV Networks

Md Sazedur Rahman, Mohamed Abdelsamee Elmahallawy, Sanjay Madria, Samuel Frimpong (Missouri University of Science and Technology).

Poster

Classifying Malware Traffic Using Images and Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Roger Davis, Kaushik Roy, Jingsheng Xu (North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University).

Comparison of LSTM and MLP Trained Under Differential Privacy For Intrusion Detection

Daniel Machooka, Xiaohong Yuan, Kaushik Roy (North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University), Guenvere Chen (University of Texas, San Antonio).

DefWeb: Defending User Privacy against Cache-based Website Fingerprinting Attacks with Intelligent Noise Injection

Seonghun Son, Debopriya Roy Dipta, Berk Gulmezoglu (Iowa State University).

Poster

**Detecting, Explaining, and Managing Anomalies in Industrial Control Systems

Clement Fung, Eric Zeng, Lujo Bauer (Carnegie Mellon University).

Poster

Digital Forensics of Additive Manufacturing Systems

Daniel Bradford Miller, Jacob Gatlin (University of South Alabama), William Bradley Glisson (Sam Houston State University), Mark Yampolskiy, Jeffrey Todd McDonald (University of South Alabama).

DISC: A Dataset for Information Security Classification

Elijah Bass, Massimiliano Albanese, Marcos Zampieri (George Mason University).

**Dynamic Frequency-Based Fingerprinting Attacks against Modern Sandbox Environments

Debopriya Roy Dipta (Iowa State University), Thore Tiemann (University of Luebeck), Berk Gulmezoglu (Iowa State University), Eduard Marin (Telefonica Research), Thomas Eisenbarth (University of Luebeck).

Poster

**End-to-End Encryption for Cyber-Physical Systems Using Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Robert Lois (University of Pittsburgh).

**Enhancing IoT Security: Anomaly Detection using Deep Support Vector Data Description and Contractive Autoencoder

Sharmin Aktar, Abdullah Yasin Nur (University of New Orleans).

Poster

*Estimating Intrinsic Dimension to Architect Compact Neural Networks

James Bonacci, Peyton Lutchkus, Reese Martin, Rob Pava, Ping Wang (Robert Morris University). Government Problem Mentor Bradford Kline (National Security Agency).

From 5G Sniffing to Harvesting Leakages of Privacy-Preserving Messengers

Norbert Ludant (Northeastern University), Pieter Robyns (Hasselt University), Guevara Noubir (Northeastern University).

FSPDE: A Full Stack Plausibly Deniable Encryption System for Mobile Devices

Jinghui Liao (Wayne State University), Niusen Chen (Michigan Technological University), Lichen Xia (University of Delaware), Bo Chen (Michigan Technological University), Weisong Shi (University of Delaware).

Poster

Harnessing AI for Advanced Network Security: From Attacks on Privacy to Defensive Innovations

Nate Mathews (Rochester Institute of Technology), James K. Holland, Nicholas Hopper (University of Minnesota), Matthew Wright (Rochester Institute of Technology).

Poster

Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User-Generated Content Games Using Large Vision-Language Models

Keyan Guo, Ayush Utkarsh, Wenbo Ding, Isabelle Ondracek (University at Buffalo), Ziming Zhao (Northeastern University), Guo Freeman (Clemnson University), Nishant Vishwamitra (University of Texas at San Antonio), Hongxin Hu (University at Buffalo).

Overview of Intelligent Inverters and Associated Cybersecurity Issues for Grid-Connected Solar Photovoltaic System

Sai Nikhil Vodapally, Mohd Hasan Ali (University of Memphis).

SMET: Semantic Mapping of CVE to ATT&CK and Its Application to Cybersecurity

Basel Abdeen (University of Texas at Dallas), Ehab Al-Shaer (Carnegie Mellon University), Anoop Singhal (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Latifur Khan, Kevin Hamlen (University of Texas at Dallas).

UntrustIDE: Exploiting Weaknesses in VS Code Extensions

Elizabeth Lin, Igibek Koishybayev, Trevor Dunlap, William Enck, Alexandros Kapravelos (North Carolina State University).

Poster

Unveiling IoT Security in Reality: A Firmware-Centric Journey

Nicolas Nino (University of Georgia), Ruibo Lu, Wei Zhou (Huazhong University of Science), Kyu Hyung Lee (University of Georgia), Ziming Zha (Northeastern University), Le Guan (University of Georgia).

**VOGUES: Validation of Object Guise Using Estimated Components

Raymond Muller (Purdue University), Yanmao Man, Ming Li (University of Arizona), Ryan Gerdes (Virginia Tech), Johnathan Petit (Qualcomm), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University).

**Who Comes Up with this Stuff? Interviewing Authors to Understand How They Produce Security Advice

Lorenzo Neil (North Carolina State University), Harshini Sri Ramulu (The George Washington University), Yasemin Acar (Paderborn University & The George Washington University), Bradley Reaves (North Carolina State University).

ZCube: A Zero-Trust, Zero-Knowledge, and Zero-Memory Platform for Privacy and yet Secured Access

Vinh Quach, Ram Dantu, Sirisha Talapuru, Shakila Zaman, Apurba Pokharel (University of North Texas).

Poster

Updated: March 10, 2025

CAE Community of Practice
Cyber Research