Together, Associate Professor Haibo He and Associate Professor Yan “Lindsay” Sun are encouraging students to confront realworld threats while pursuing research to protect our infrastructure and online reputations. “A lot of people hear these scary cyberattack stories on the news,” Sun says. “As professors, the question we ask ourselves is, how do we protect the community from these attacks?” It starts by teaching the next generation of computer engineers to build more secure systems. Both professors make it a point to discuss the latest threats in class. When
researchers unveiled the Heartbleed Bug in April, Sun rearranged her teaching schedule to present the malware that exposed passwords and other private information. “I asked them to discuss, if you’re a decision maker, what policies are you going to make?” she says. Her students proposed keeping the bug’s existence hidden from the public. However, they would fix the problem covertly by including a patch in inconspicuous software updates. By limiting the updates to U.S. computers, American consumers would be protected but national security agencies could exploit the flaw against enemies.
“I’m very proud of them,” Sun says. “It shows they learned that you have to think about cybersecurity not only from a consumer’s point of view.” Engineers are increasingly faced with the intersection of policy, implementation and national security. The challenge of balancing those while protecting American consumers is no easy task; today it’s hard to find a device that does not connect to the Internet. Besides computers and smartphones, we’re linking refrigerators, garage doors, drones, traffic cameras, and even eyeglasses to the World Wide Web. Security experts call it the “Internet of Things.” The two professors call it the “Internet of Vulnerability.”
Cybersecurity studies in Tyler Hall on URI’s Kingston Campus this spring.
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PHOTOS: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM, CHRIS BARRETT, JOE GIBLIN, NORA LEWIS, COURTESY HAIBO HE, YIHAI ZHU, JUN YAN
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