CSAW’22 Cybersecurity Games & Conference

Past Events

CSAW’22 marks the 9th anniversary of CSAW MENA (Middle East North Africa) organized by NYU Abu Dhabi. CSAW NYU Abu Dhabi is managed by a team of undergraduate and graduate students, and researchers from the Engineering Department and the Center for Cyber Security.

Competitions

Capture the Flag

CSAW CTF is one of the oldest and biggest CTFs with 1216 teams with 1+ points in 2021. Designed as an entry-level, jeopardy-style CTF, this competition is for students who are trying to break into the field of security, as well as for advanced students and industry professionals who want to practice their skills.

CSAW CTF occurs over two rounds: a Qualifying Round in September and a Final Round in November. 

Congratulations to the CTF 2022 Winners!

1st Place

ShellSec (ESI Algiers)

Oussama Abdallah Merouan
Hithem Lamri
Mohamed Laid Malik Mabrouki
Mohamed Amokrane Abdelmalek

2nd Place

SOter14 (INSAT)

Oussama Abdallah Merouan
Hithem Lamri
Mohamed Laid Malik Mabrouki
Mohamed Amokrane Abdelmalek

3rd Place

MISC (ESTIN Bejaia)

Boukerfa Muhammad El Amin

Applied Research Competition 

This “Best Paper Award” assesses the top scholarly security research from the previous year. The focus of this competition is on research that has a practical impact.  With eligibility limited to already published papers or camera-ready papers, CSAW has a reputation for drawing some of the best security research worldwide. 

Congratulations to the ARC 2022 Winners!

1st Place

Naif Mehanna
for the paper “DRAWNAPART : A Device Identification Technique based on Remote GPU Fingerprinting”

2nd Place

Lilas Alrahis
for the paper “MuxLink : Circumventing learning-Resilient MUX-Locking Using Graph Neural-based Link Prediction”

3rd Place

Mahnoor Zaheer
for the paper “Lure for Money: A First Look into YouTube Videos Promoting Money-Making Apps”

 

Hack My Robot 

The Hack My Robot Challenge aims to raise awareness about the cybersecurity aspects of increasingly digitalized construction environments with a particular focus on robotics. 2022 marks the first year of this challenge, and the students who want to learn more about operational technology security, robotics, and construction technologies are invited to attend. This year’s focus is on autonomous site monitoring systems. The participants will be challenged to come up with ideas to compromise the data and operations of the given robotic system considering the characteristics of construction sites.

This challenge is organized by the S.M.A.R.T. Construction Research Group with the support and collaboration from the Center for Cybersecurity (CCS) at NYUAD and the Center for AI and Robotics (CAIR) at NYUAD. The competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in any university in the MENA region.

Congratulations to the HMR 2022 Winners!

1st Place

Team SENTRY
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

Ioannis Zografopoulos
Alyah Alfageh
Li Zhou
Shijie Pan

2nd Place

Team YASTA
New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), United Arab Emirates

Abdullah Alhasni
Salman Elgamal
Youssab William
Omar Mostafa

Keynote Speaker: Rafay Baloch

Title: What does the Digital Future hold for us? – Impact of Emerging Tech on Privacy and Security

Abstract: In this talk, Rafay Baloch will talk about emerging technologies such as IOT, Machine to Machine Economy, Quantum Computing, Metaverse, Artificial Intelligence and Web 3.0 and their implications on both privacy and Security. A major portion of this talk will be on how the public’s trust can be undermined using Fake News and ultimately Deepfake with real-word case studies and investigations.               

​Introduction: Rafay Baloch is a globally acclaimed Cyber security expert/Whitehat Hacker with a proven track record of discovering Critical Zero Day Security Issues in a significant number of Web Applications , products and Browsers which have helped protecting Privacy and Security of millions of users globally. Being recognized among “Top 5 Ethical Hackers of 2014″ by Security company Checkmarx,”The 15 Most Successful Ethical Hackers WorldWide” and among “Top 25 Threat Seekers” by SCmagazine.  “Top-21 Cybersecurity Experts You Must Follow on Twitter in 2021” Reflectiz.On 23 March 2022, ISPR (Media/PR Wing) recognized contribution in the field of Cyber Security with Pride for Pakistan recognition and award. Applicant is author of Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide” from well-known publisher Taylor Francis in 2014.  The book has been featured in Fifteen must have books for penetration testing professionals by Infosecinstitute. Rafay has presented his research at International Cyber Security conferences such as Blackhat, HEXCON, SDPI, Cezeri etc. He is frequently featured on National and International mainstream media including Independent UK Urdu, BBC Urdu, Express Tribune, Dawn, GEO etc providing insights/analysis on prevailing Cyber Security topics. Rafay is currently working as Sr. Consultant Cyber Security for PTA, a telecom regulator in Pakistan and frequently advises the government on Cyber Security related matters.

Biochip Workshop and Hackathon

Past Events

The NYUAD Center for Cyber Security and Engineering, together hosted a first-ever microfluidic workshop and hackathon with the help of NYUAD iGEM team. The workshop included hands-on practice on a commercial microfluidic biochip, which were used for RT-PCR COVID-19 detection at NYUAD. These biochips use microfluidic technologies and integrated fluidic circuits for their operation. They present a potent future keeping in view the era of global pandemics and personalized medicines. In total, 40 participants from different universities and high schools of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah participated to gain insights on the cyber-physical security aspects of the biochips. Before the start of the workshop, the participants listened to the talks given by Dr. Navajit Singh Baban (Postdoctoral Associate) and Mr. Ajymurat Orozaliev (Research Engineer), who are involved in the project of Biochip Cyber-physical security. Post-lunch, the participants took part in a 24 hour hackathon where the central theme was to explore and suggest possible attack ideas that can compromise the biochips in a stealthy manner. The event was kindly supported by Prof. Ramesh Karri (Co-chair Center for Cyber Security NYU), Prof. Rafael (Yong-Ak) Song (NYUAD Program Head of Bioengineering) and Prof. Ozgur Sinanoglu (Director CCS NYUAD).

Regional Day 2022

Past Events

The Cybersecurity Regional Day Event that brings together the cybersecurity experts in the region, both in the UAE and MENA at large. The purpose of this roundtable was to discuss cyber security research, with a focus on regional issues. Aimed to create meaningful and significant research relationships with the MENA region. This was a networking event where all of the experts gathered to hear about each other’s newest cybersecurity work and identify collaboration opportunities.

TinyML Talks: Energy-Efficiency and Security for TinyML and EdgeAI: A Cross-Layer Approach

News

Talk by Prof. Muhammad Shafique

Modern Machine Learning (ML) approaches like Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown tremendous improvement over the past years to achieve a significantly high accuracy for a certain set of tasks, like image classification, object detection, natural language processing, and medical data analytics. However, these DNN require huge processing, memory, and energy costs, besides being vulnerable to several security threats. This talk will present challenges and cross-layer frameworks for building highly energy-efficient and robust machine learning systems for the tinyML and EdgeAI applications, which jointly leverage optimizations at different software and hardware layers, e.g., neural accelerator, memory access optimizations, approximations, hardware-aware NAS and network compression. These cross-layer techniques enable new opportunities for improving the area, power/energy, and performance efficiency of systems by orders of magnitude, which is a crucial step towards enabling the wide-scale deployment of resource-constrained embedded AI systems like UAVs, autonomous vehicles, Robotics, IoT-Healthcare / Wearables, Industrial-IoT, etc.