KEEPING OUR
DATA SAFE
By Chris Kocher
18
WATSON REVIEW
N
early 30 years after the internet opened to the public, more and more of our data are online. Financial records. Healthcare info. Social media. Personal photos and videos stored in the cloud. The latest smart fridges text us when we’re low on milk, high-end cars email when they need servicing and home thermostats can be adjusted from anywhere on the planet. We’re quickly approaching a Jetsons world of future wonders — but all those connections only make us more vulnerable to hackers. That’s where cybersecurity experts come in. For years, researchers at Binghamton University have developed ways to make our internet experience safer. Those efforts became better coordinated in 2019 with the establishment of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC), an organized research center directed by Associate Professor Ping Yang from Watson College’s Department of Computer Science. Yang arrived at Binghamton in 2006, after earning her doctorate at Stony Brook University, and she taught Watson’s first graduate cybersecurity course. “Before 2019, we already had a strong cybersecurity research and education program, but there was not much collaboration among researchers,” she says. “Individual cybersecurity faculty members had limited exposure to the research that was outside of their expertise. So
we submitted a proposal to the ORC [organized research center] program in 2019 to establish CIAC to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration among cybersecurity researchers.” Because cybersecurity touches so many areas, CIAC includes 25 faculty members from nearly every corner of campus: Watson College (of course), but also Harpur College, the School of Management, Decker College, and the College of Community and Public Affairs. Their research areas range from programming and computer engineering to security policy, education technology, mathematics and psychology.
MULTIPLE VULNERABILITIES When most of us think about hacking, we see it as a software problem — and, worryingly, cybersecurity breaches in the past decade have exposed weaknesses in the fundamental building blocks of computer coding. “Even at the level of computer architecture, people assumed that standard out-of-order execution designs are safe and nobody questioned their security implications,” says Dmitry Ponomarev, a computer science professor and CIAC associate director. “Recently, it was discovered that these architectures can cause significant security threats and leak sensitive information. As a result, now we have to rethink the entire processor architecture design with security in mind, and that shakes the foundation of what we’ve been doing for 40 years.”
