Illinois Science of Security (SoS) Lablet

Paulo Esteves-Verissimo, University of Luxembourg
April 28, 2017, 4:00 p.m., B02 Coordinated Science Laboratory

slides | video

Abstract: Computing and communications infrastructures have become commodities which societies largely depend on, transacting huge quantities of data and exhibiting pervasive interconnections, sometimes in critical conditions. However, the actual magnitude that security and dependability risks may assume, is often misperceived. The information society has been assuming risk behaviours, without the adequate protection. Many stakeholders, not only end-users but vendors, service providers, public administrations and — what may be surprising — even governments, seem to ignore those risks, in different ways.

Yet, as will be shown in the talk, the problem should be obvious from the symptoms that have lately seen the light. Threats are everyday more powerful, massive or targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats entered the situational awareness agenda of nations. However, systems remain flaky, sometimes seemingly intentionally, vulnerabilities persist, and partial and/or specific fixes imperfectly mend what are sometimes global problems. Grand challenges deserve grand solutions, and so the talk will conclude along two lines of discussion, as a contribution to the debate on science of cybersecurity: effective strategies for cybersecurity are in dire need; advanced research breaking with traditional paradigms is required.

Bio: Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo is a Professor and FNR PEARL Chair at the University of Luxembourg Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC), since fall 2014, and head of the CritiX lab (Critical and Extreme Security and Dependability) at SnT, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust at the same University (http://wwwen.uni.lu/snt). He is adjunct Professor of the ECE Dept., Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he has been a Professor of the Univ. of Lisbon, member of the Board of the same university and Director of LaSIGE (http://lasige.di.fc.ul.pt). Veríssimo is Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the ACM, and he is associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He is currently Chair of the IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance and vice-Chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE/IFIP DSN conference. He is currently interested in secure and dependable distributed architectures, middleware and algorithms for: resilience of large-scale systems and critical infrastructures, privacy and integrity of highly sensitive data, and adaptability and safety of real-time networked embedded systems. He is author of over 180 peer-refereed publications and co-author of 5 books.