MS Thesis Defense

A Multilayer Framework to Catch Data Exfiltration

Puneet Sharma

10:30am Wednesday, 5 June 2013, 325b ITE, UMBC

Data exfilteration is the unauthorized leakage of confidential data from a particular system. It is a specific form of intrusion that is particularly hard to catch due to the most common cause: an insider entity who is responsible for the leak. That entity could be a person employed in the organization or a malicious hardware component bought from an unreliable third party. Catching such intrusions, therefore, can be extremely difficult. We describe a framework comprising multiple parameters that are constantly monitored in a system. These parameters can cover the entire stack of the computer architecture, from the hardware up to the application layer. Malicious behavior is detected by different modules monitoring these parameters and an aggregated attack alert is produced if multiple modules detect malicious activity within a short period of time. A more distributed and comprehensive monitoring framework should ensure that designing an attack becomes extremely difficult since an attack must go through multiple detectors present in the system without raising any alarms.

Committee: Drs. Anupam Joshi (chair), Tim Finin, Chintan Patel

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

The Modeling Equation: Solving the Physically-Based

Modeling and Animation Problem with a Unified Solution

Yu Wang

11:00am Monday, June 3, 2013, VANGOGH Lab, ITE 352

Physically-based modeling, i.e. the ability to model sophisticated geometrical shapes and objects in complex physical environments, is an important and popular research area in computer graphics, especially in animation and modeling. Rigid body dynamics studies how solid objects react to external forces without considering collisions (unconstrained), or the interaction between rigid bodies without inter-penetration (constrained). Deformable object modeling accounts for the effects of material properties, external forces, and environment constrains on object deformation. Fluid simulation in computer graphics heavily studies efficient way of solving and/or approximating the physically-based Navier-Stokes equations.

It’s difficult to account for these behaviors from a mechanics point of view, but they have analogous rheological equations. To be exact, rheology studies deformation and flow of matters by accounting for the movements of particles that comprise the material relative to each other. There are three different rheological properties: if we apply definite forces to a material to make it reach a definite deformation, and the deformation goes back when the forces are removed, the material is elastic; if the deformation remains permanent, the material is plastic; or under definite forces, the deformation keeps increase without a limit, the material flows.

I’m proposing to create physically-accurate material behaviors using a generalized formulation based on rheological theories, i.e. kinematic and dynamic properties of rigid bodies, deformable objects, fluid-like materials can be represented by the same formulation with different weights to their rheological properties.

Committee: Drs. Marc Olano (Chair and Advisor), Matthias K. Gobbert (Mathematics and Statistics), Penny Rheingans, Lynn Sparling (Physics), Jian Chen

Consider spending some time next semester thinking about who you are and how you best work with other to make a difference in your community. 

Foundations of Leadership Development (3 credits)

PSYC 216 & EDUC 216 (cross-listed); Wednesdays 4:30-7 pm

Who are you?

What are your strengths?

What is your legacy at UMBC?

What do you want to do after graduation?

Foundations of Leadership Development is:

• Highly-interactive
• 100% focused on your development
• Project-based
• FOR EVERYONE. No previous knowledge, skills, or experiences required.

Watch some student videos from last semester

Students said:

• “I have recommended (class) to several friends”
• “The interactions in class and activities inherently enhanced learning about the subject”
• “This was an immensely helpful and enjoyable class with a very unique style of learning the material”
• “Should be a required course if possible for all majors”

Questions? --> Email Virginia Byrne, Coordinator for Leadership Development & Education of the Office of Student Life, at vbyrne@umbc.edu

Note: This course will also be offered in the spring of 2014. Prefer students who have taken PSYC 100 or AP Psychology, but are lenient. Contact for more info. 

UMBC is running a summer day camp for rising 9th grade girls
at UMBC this summer. The goal is to increase their interest
in computing by sharing some of the exciting aspects of the
field and teaching them to use technology like Alice,
Python, and Dreamweaver. The camp is run by a group of
student coordinators who are excited and passionate about
sharing their interest in computing with younger students.

The camp runs for five weeks, from June 24 - July 26. The camp organizers  are especially interested in recruiting students from under-served communities and from less affluent backgrounds, and there are many full and partial scholarships available.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until the
program fills. Financial aid applications are due by June 8
(but we will consider late requests, subject to the availability
of funds.) The application is available on the website.

Questions can be directed to  the project coordinators at artemis-project@cs.umbc.edu. or Dr. Marie desJardins, mariedj@cs.umbc.edu.


CWIT Scholars and Affiliates are also encouraged to share information below and attached flyer about the camp with former high school and middle school teachers and with any rising 9th grade girls that they know who might be interested in learning more about computing!

Check out the latest issue of "Women of Color" magazine. It contains great articles that apply to all engineering and computing majors.

MS Thesis Defense

Extracting cybersecurity related entities,
terms and concepts from text

Ravendar Lal

10:30am Tuesday, 28 May 2013, ITE325b, UMBC

Securing computers, data, cyber-physical systems and networks is a growing problem as society's dependence on them increases while they remain vulnerable to attacks by both criminals and rival nation states. Creating 'situationally aware' computer systems that defend against new "zero day" software vulnerabilities requires them to automatically integrate and use new security-related data from a wide variety of sources. One important source is information found in text from security bulletins, vulnerability databases, news reports, cybersecurity blogs and Internet chat rooms.

We describe an information extraction framework to extract cybersecurity-relevant entities, terms and concepts from text. We use a Conditional Random Field based model trained on manually annotated data to identify and extract the relevant terms. These are then mapped to a previously developed OWL ontology and represented as RDF linked data. We evaluated the system's performance by comparing its results on test data from the National Vulnerability Database and security bulletins from Microsoft and Adobe.

Committee: Drs. Tim Finin (Advisor), Anupam Joshi, Tim Oates

Five students in UMBC's College of Engineering and Information Technology have been selected for major scholarships to pursue studies in cybersecurity-related fields under UMBC's participation in the National Science Foundation's Scholarship for Service (SFS) Federal CyberCorps program. As SFS Scholars, students receive full tuition, fees, annual reimbursement of professional development expenses ($3,000), a nine-month stipend ($20,000 for undergraduates, $25,000 for MS/MPS students, and $30,000 for PhD students) for up to two years (three years for PhD), and assistance with federal cybersecurity internships and career placement.

The awardees for AY13-14 are:

Nathan Price, MS (CMPE)
Punlada Muangrat, BS (IS)
Shannon Mcpherson, MPS (CYBR)
Alex Cooke, BS (IS)
Denis Danilin, MS (IS)

These new awardees will join existing UMBC SFS Scholars Oliver Kubik (BS, CMSC), Mary Mathews (PhD, CMSC), Brendan Masiar (MPS, CYBR) and Brandyn Schult (MPS, CYBR).

The CyberCorps program produces highly-qualified professionals to meet the United States government's increasing need to protect American's cyber infrastructure. While in the program at UMBC, SFS CyberCorps Scholars participate in special SFS program activities, have opportunities to engage in mentored research opportunities both at UMBC and its partners from industry and government, and must complete a paid summer internship for the federal government. Upon graduation, each student must work for the government (for pay) for one year for each year of scholarship received. Drs. Alan Sherman and Richard Forno direct the program under a five-year $2.5 million NSF grant received in 2012.

NOTE:  We expect to have additional SFS slots coming available in January 2014.  Applications for SFS support beginning in the Spring 2014 semester will be accepted through 12PM on Friday, 15 November 2013. All levels of study are welcome to apply — however, students must be admitted to (or already enrolled at) UMBC first before applying for SFS.

For information about SFS (including application information and instructions) and other US government-related cybersecurity scholarships available, please visit cisa.umbc.edu.