Research

2023 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2023.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2023

An analysis of the Google Metrics 2023 for security venues.

Best paper award at DIMVA 23

Another one of Alessandro's papers recently received a best paper awards, this time at DIMVA'23

2022 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2022.

Two best paper awards

Two of Alessandro's papers recently got best paper awards at ACSAC and CPSIoTSec

2021 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2021.

Tenure at CISPA

In December 2021, I was awarded tenure at CISPA. My new W3-equivalent position starts on Jan 1st 2022.

2020 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2020.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2020

An analysis of the Google Metrics 2020 for security venues.

2019 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2019.

Conversion of page to Hugo/Academic

I now finished converting this page (and in particular, the ~80 news posts) to use the Hugo framework with Academic theme.

Public Disclosure of KNOB Attack

We are finally able to announce our KNOB attack work, a project with Daniele Antonioli (SUTD) and Kasper Rasmussen (Oxford). In the work, we show that the Bluetooth protocol as used by billions of devices is broken from a security perspective, and attackers can eavesdrop and manipulate communication in a stealthy way.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2019

An analysis of the Google Metrics 2019 for security venues.

Successful PhD Defenses by Daniele and Hamid

My two first PhD students, Daniele Antonioli and Hamid Ghaeini, successfully defended their PhD in Singapore yesterday. Daniele presented his thesis with the title "Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Secure Cyber-Physical and Wireless Systems", which included two recent tier one publications. Hamid's thesis has the title "Threats to Industrial Control Systems and Process-based Countermeasures", and included a recent RAID paper.

2018 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2018.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2018

An analysis of the Google Metrics 2018 for security venues.

Joining CISPA in August

In August 2018, I will leave SUTD and join CISPA as faculty member. CISPA is a German research center focusing on world-class security research, headed by Michael Backes..

2017 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2017.

Visit by Ralph Holz

Prof. Ralph Holz from Syndey University will visit SUTD on 7 Nov. At 3pm in LT3, he will give a public talk on the following topic.

Visit by Debdeep Mukhopadhyay

We are hosting Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay on Oct 12 at SUTD. He will give a public talk with the title Break one link and the whole chain falls apart!: Embedding Security in Things to Cloud. Abstract: With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) the need and challenges of security have increased manifold. Starting from the miniature devices, which are often resource constrained, to the pervasive omni-present cloud, all avenues for a potential attack need to be mitigated. In this talk, we discuss the research activities in this direction, starting from physical security of the “things” in an IoT framework to developing dedicated cryptographic techniques for delegating data in the cloud. The talk also summarizes the research activities at the Secured Embedded Architecture Laboratory (SEAL), IIT Kharagpur, India.

Finals of NSE Data Challenge 2017

We held our finals for the National Science Experiment Data Challenge 2017 at SUTD on September 13.

SUTD’s FIRST Industry Workshop 2017

I am happy to announce that my PhD students Hamid and Daniele both won an award each at the FIRST industry workshop, held at SUTD.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2017

An analysis of the Google Metrics 2017 for security venues.

SCy-Phy Systems Week 2017 completed

We just concluded our main event for this year, the Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Week at SUTD.

Think-In event at SCy-Phy Systems Week

We have finalized our selection of panelists for the 2-day Think-In event at next week’s SCy-Phy Systems week.

Best Paper award at CPSS’17

Our paper “SIPHON: Towards Scalable High-Interaction Physical Honeypots” won the best paper award at the 3rd ACM Cyber-Physical System Security Workshop (CPSS), co-located with AsiaCCS.

Visit by Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

We are hosting Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from TU Darmstadt at SUTD on March 23. He will give a talk at 3:30 in LT3, titled _Things, Trouble, Trust: On Building Trust in IoT Systems_.

BATADAL Finished

Our Battle of the Attack Detection Algorithms (BATADAL) competition finished yesterday, and we now released the true labels to the participants.

2016 in numbers

My year in numbers for 2016.

Open Positions in NSE project

We have several open positions in the National Science Experiment: Research Assistant (Data analytics, Python), Web Dev (MEAN stack), Research Assistant/PostDoc (Data analytics).

10+ Years of System Security Circus

Davide Balzarotti released the following very nice analysis of academic research on security as published in the Top4 venues in the last 10 years.

SVN over SSH

I use SVN for my personal documents, research and teaching material. I finally got around to configure the server in what I expect to be a secure and usuable setup for multiple users.

bibrest – RESTful bibtex server

I recently got bibrest into a usable state, a pet project that is aimed at providing dynamic .bib files for websites.

Open Positions

My SCy-Phy group is currently looking for at least one Post-Doc from October 2016 onwards. Potential projects are ASPIRE and ReSILIoT.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2017

An analysis of the Google Metrics 2017 for security venues.

Visit by Prof. Adrian Perrig

I’m hosting Prof. Adrian Perrig from ETH Zurich at SUTD on May 11 2016. He will give a public talk with the following details.

NSE wins SG Mark award

Our National Science Experiment team at SUTD was awarded the SG Mark 2016 from the Design Business Chamber Singapore. More information here.

Visit by Prof. Dieter Gollmann

I’m hosting Prof. Dieter Gollmann from TUHH on March 17 2016. He will give a public talk with the following details.

Google scholar milestone

At the beginning of February 2016, my publications reached 500 citations according to Google scholar.

National Science Experiment Coverage

Our National Science experiment was recently featured in the Straits Times, our national newspaper. More info here.

Skyhook article on the National Science Project

Skyhook is the localization service we use to determine locations of measurements taken in the National Science Experiment. They did a quick interview on the project with me.

First run of National Science Experiment underway

This week, the first run of the National Science Experiment started with about 15,000 sensor nodes distributed to schools all over Singapore.

SCy-Phy Site Online

We now have a website for the SCy-Phy group at SUTD, follow this link. We will use it to provide updates on our research projects, and the group members.

Challenges and Opportunities in Practical Industrial Control System Security Research

I willl visit the SVA group of Prof. Dieter Gollmann at TUHH. On August 20, 10.30am, I will give an invited talk with the title “Challenges and Opportunities in Practical Industrial Control System Security Research”.

Searching Google Scholar for institution publications/profiles

I recently discovered that you can also use Google scholar to search for all articles hosted by an institution, and all faculty members with a Scholar profile at that institution.

Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking

An analysis of the Google Metrics for security venues.

Secure Water Treatment Testbed launched

SWaT, our testbed for security research on industrial control systems, was launched this week. SWaT faithfully replicates a water treatment system, including the physical process with pipes, tanks, filter, and chemical treatment.

New PhD Student: Hamid

Hamid Reza Ghaeini joined my group as PhD student in January. He earned his MSc from Tarbiat Modares University, Teheran.

National Experiment Grant accepted

Our national experiment proposal was announced by President Dr Tony Tan. This project is led by Prof. Erik Wilhelm of the EPD pillar at SUTD. The project aims to provide Singaporean school students with smart sensors that can be used for scientific experiments at school. In total, it will involve 250,000 students over the next three years.

SUTD-ASPIRE proposal accepted by NRF

NRF has announced the 7 accepted proposals (out of 20) for the National Cybersecurity Research programme, for a total funding of S$42M.

Connecting to SUTD VPN from Ubuntu/Linux

This short post summarizes the settings required to connect to SUTD’s Juniper VPN box from Ubuntu (other distros might slightly differ). This is enabled due to MadScientist’s perl scripting magic, and some trial & error on my side.

Joining CYPRO / iTrust stage 1

I will join the CYPRO project of the iTrust centre as Co-PI. In particular, I will be responsible for the research task Defending against physical attacks. For that grant, I will work together with Dr. He Liang from SUTD.

Project SAFE accepted

My proposal for Project SAFE was accepted by SUTD last week. The project will start in August’14 and is planned to run for three years. Overall funding is 100k SGD.

Website Updated

I started to put of preliminary information on 50.020 Security for Fall term 2014 here. I also added the contact info with some directions.