[Colloq] Guest Speaker:"Defending Systems Under Risk of Total Compromise" | Alina Oprea, RSA Laboratories | 1/25/16 366WVH 1:30pm-2:30pm

[Walker, Lashauna]

Speaker: Alina Oprea
Date: 1/25/16
Time: 1:30-2:30pm
Location: 366 WVH

Title: Defending Systems under Risk of Total Compromise


Abstract:
Security breaches are on the rise as attackers continuously evolve their strategies and traditional defensive methods are largely ineffective at keeping up. In this talk, I will discuss how techniques from game theory and machine learning can be used to develop more effective defenses in face of increasingly powerful adversaries.

I will first introduce a game-theoretical framework called FlipIt that models the interaction between attackers and defenders in complex security scenarios, and challenges common assumptions in system defense. The analysis in FlipIt can be used to derive a number of fundamental principles for defending our systems and infrastructures, such as the use of randomization and adaptive strategies.

I will also discuss the design of an analytics platform that processes large volumes of log data with the goal of building practical tools for proactive breach detection. Compared to a large body of related work in behavioral security modeling, our work is different in two main aspects. We leverage the domain expertise of security analysts from EMC CIRC (Critical Incident Response Center) for feature extraction, refinement of machine learning models and validation of findings. Additionally, our techniques have been successfully applied in production in a large organization for more than a year and identified hundreds of new attacks.

Bio:
Alina Oprea is a Consultant Research Scientist at RSA Laboratories, the security division of EMC. Her research interests span multiple areas in computer and communications security including foundations of cybersecurity, data science for security applications, applied cryptography and designing protocols for securing data stored in the cloud. Alina holds a B.S. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Bucharest, Romania, and has obtained M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 and 2007, respectively. She is the recipient of the 2011 TR35 award for her research in cloud security.



Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Events and Administrative Specialist
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-2763
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