Trusted CI podcast

• March 2025: The Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix

  Operational Technology (OT), when installed on an organization's network, becomes part of the overall cyber attack surface for an organization. When procuring this OT, it is important for the purchasing organization to understand how it will integrate with the existing network and security controls as well as understand what new risks it might introduce. The Trusted CI Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix (the Matrix) provides a prioritized list of questions for organizations to send to manufacturers and suppliers to try to get as much of this information as possible. In this webinar, we will walk through what security issues impact OT, the role of procurement in mitigating security risks, our reasoning and process for developing the Matrix, and a walk through on how to use the Matrix at your organization. Questions and shared experiences with OT are encouraged. TARGET AUDIENCE: Organizational leadership, procurement department, IT, cybersecurity The Matrix can be found at https://trustedci.org/ot-matrix Speaker Bio: Chief Security Analyst Mark Krenz is focused on cybersecurity operations, research, and education. He has more than two decades of experience in system, network administration, programming, and system security and has spent the last decade focused on cybersecurity. He also serves as the CISO of Trusted CI.

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• January 2025: A Unified Monitoring Approach to Enhancing the Security and Resiliency of Hazard Workflows

  In this talk, we will first discuss techniques to improve the resiliency of hazard monitoring systems. This includes optimizing machine learning training pipelines for wildfire detection to achieve faster, more accurate results while adapting to real-world constraints such as data variability and network latencies. We will also explore enabling multi-tenancy to maximize resource efficiency by allowing multiple hazard detection workflows to share infrastructure without compromising performance. Furthermore, we will present an in-depth analysis of power and energy consumption for edge devices deployed in remote and resource-constrained environments, emphasizing sustainable and scalable design choices that support long-term operation. Next, we will describe ongoing efforts to enhance the security of critical cyberinfrastructures. This includes developing techniques to prevent denial-of-service attacks that could disrupt hazard monitoring workflows and implementing secure data transmission mechanisms to safeguard information across distributed CI layers. Speaker Bios: Sudarsun Kannan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. His research focuses on operating system design and its intersection with computer architecture, distributed systems, and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. His work has been published in top venues such as ASPLOS, OSDI, and FAST, and he has received best paper awards at SOSP and ASPLOS, along with the Google Research Scholar award. He co-chaired the HotStorage'22 workshop and serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Storage. Before joining Rutgers, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Wisconsin-Madison and graduated with an M.S. and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech. Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer and Data Sciences, and co-directs the Oregon Networking Research Group (ONRG) at the University of Oregon. Ram earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and his B.Tech. in Information Technology from the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Anna University. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in various conferences, journals, and workshops. His research has been recognized with several awards including the NSF CAREER award, NSF CRII award, Ripple faculty fellowship, UO faculty research award, best paper awards from ACM CoNEXT and ACM SIGCOMM GAIA, and has been covered in several fora (NYTimes, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Boston Globe, Gizmodo, Mashable, among others). Recently, his research on Internet topology has been named as "One of the 100 Greatest Innovations," has been cited in FCC's Spectrum Frontiers 2d Report and Order, and has won a number of awards including the "Best of What's New" (in security category) by the Popular Science Magazine.

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• November 2024: Privacy Preserving Aggregate Range Queries on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Databases

  Data-driven collaborations often involve sharing large-scale datasets in cloud environments, where adversaries may exploit server vulnerabilities to access sensitive information. Traditional approaches, such as Trusted Execution Environments, lack the scalability for parallel processing, while techniques like homomorphic encryption incur prohibitive computational overheads. ARMOR addresses these limitations by developing encrypted querying techniques that support a variety of scientific data types and queries, balancing efficiency with privacy. The project’s interdisciplinary team focuses on advancing encryption methods, improving query performance for multidimensional data, and rigorously evaluating security risks and overheads under real-world scenarios. A recent research under ARMOR is the development of Secure Standard Aggregate Queries (SSAQ), a novel approach for secure aggregation on multidimensional sparse datasets stored on untrusted servers. Aggregation functions like SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX, and STD are essential for scientific data analysis but pose privacy risks when performed on encrypted data. Existing methods using searchable encryption suffer from access pattern and volume leakage and are often limited to one-dimensional settings. SSAQ overcomes these challenges by employing d-dimensional segment trees to precompute responses for all possible query ranges, thus improving the efficiency of secure range queries. To further reduce leakage, SSAQ integrates Oblivious RAM (ORAM) to conceal data access patterns during query execution. This combination ensures a higher level of security, making SSAQ suitable for complex scientific data scenarios where sensitive information needs to be safeguarded. The approach significantly extends the applicability of searchable encryption techniques, offering a scalable and efficient solution for secure data analytics in cloud environments while minimizing privacy risks. Speaker Bio: Dr. Hoda Maleki is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University, specializing in system security, applied cryptography, and blockchain technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Maleki's research addresses critical security challenges, including IoT security, secure data retrieval in encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving data access in cloud environments. Her work leverages the Universally Composable (UC) security framework to analyze complex systems and employs multi-dimensional searchable encryption to protect massive scientific datasets. With over $1 million in NSF funding, her research advances scalable, efficient cryptographic solutions that meet the security needs of modern data-driven applications.

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• August 2024: JSON Web Tokens for Science: Hands on Jupyter Notebook Tutorial

  NSF cyberinfrastructure is undergoing a security transformation: a migration from X.509 user certificates to IETF-standard JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). This migration has facilitated a re-thinking of authentication and authorization among cyberinfrastructure providers: enabling federated authentication as a core capability, improving support for attribute, role, and capability-based authorization, and reducing reliance on prior identity-based authorization methods that created security and usability problems. In this webinar, members of the SciAuth project (https://sciauth.org/ - NSF award #2114989) will provide a short, hands-on tutorial for cyberinfrastructure professionals to learn about JWTs, including SciTokens (https://scitokens.org/ - NSF award #1738962). Participants will use Jupyter Notebooks to validate the security of JWTs and experiment with JWT-based authentication and authorization. Participants will gain an understanding of JWT basics suitable for understanding their security and troubleshooting any problems with their use. Speaker Bios: Dr. Jim Basney is a principal research scientist in the cybersecurity group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director and PI of Trusted CI. Jim received his PhD in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Derek Weitzel is a research assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. He has been providing distributed computing solutions to the national cyberinfrastructures since 2009. He is a member of the OSG’s production operations team and leads the operations of the National Research Platform. His current areas of research involve distributed data management for shared and opportunistic storage, secure credential management, and network monitoring and analytics.

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• July 2024: Automated Building and Deploy Testing — Using Zeek as an example

  At ESnet, we pride ourselves on being cutting-edge, even if it causes a few scratches. Every new branch of Zeek is automatically built and tested in Gitlab CI. Then, every night, the latest successful 'master' build is deployed, along with all of our packages and scripts, to a test system via Ansible. As time permits, we roll out the latest build, in production, to over 40 servers. Through this process we've both been able to provide early feedback to the Zeek project about potential bugs and give ourselves an early warning system when changes impact our production plugins and scripts. Zeek is an open source network security monitoring tool. This does not focus on the use of Zeek itself, but rather the care and feeding of our installation footprint. Speaker Bio: Michael “Dop” Dopheide has spent the majority of his career working in the R&E community specializing in systems engineering, security research, incident response, and network intrusion detection. He especially enjoys helping coworkers debug problems at the packet and protocol levels. In addition to his operational security role, Dop helps support the open source Zeek community and volunteers every year to beta test the SANS Holiday Hack challenge.

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