NYU Abu Dhabi is pleased to announce that it will partner with NYU Tandon School of Engineering to host CSAW competitions for the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region in 2016. Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur will also host concurrent competitions, expanding CSAW’s reach as an international competition with worldwide impact. 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.

Distribution of movies, music, and images is now faster and easier via computer technology, especially on the Internet. Hence, content owners (e.g., movie studios and recording companies) are concerned about illegal copying of their content. Watermarking is a major technology to achieve copyright protection and multimedia security. Robust image watermarking is the process of embedding an invisible watermark in an image in order to make it very difficult to remove the watermark after intentional attacks and normal audio/visual processes. In our research work, combination of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) via Lower-and-Upper (LU) Decomposition is proposed as a watermarking algorithm. Experimental results show that proposed algorithm is robust against filtering, scaling, JPEG compression, rotation, cropping, and salt & pepper noise attacks by high Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Structural Similarity (MSSIM) values on embedding and high Similarity Ratio (SR) values on extracting watermarks.

CCS-AD continues to develop high quality research that addresses challenges relevant to the UAE and region. The UAE has one of the most advanced Information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures in the region, as well as a high number of high-tech organizations and enterprises. However, advanced ICT infrastructures are the most vulnerable to threats and to the continuously changing advances in cyber-crime and cyber-warfare. The need for UAE based research in information and cyber-security is therefore increasingly important. UAE Cyber Security Day’s goal is to organize a visionary research session that highlights and outlines the key research issues and challenges for ICT.

Academic and scientific writing has been highly supported by the introduction of the LaTeX typesetting system. Since its initial release in 1985 by Leslie Lamport, it started to gain popularity and adoption to become the standard software system for technical writing. Not only does LaTeX enable writing mathematical notations neatly, but it also helps crafting elegant documents. Such documents can be books, theses, papers, presentations, letters, posters, etc. The high power of LaTeX will be explored in this single-lecture tutorial where the audience will be gaining hands-on experience using the system. The tutorial is intended for absolute beginners. It will proceed by providing a brief theoretical and historical background of LaTeX. After that, a simple LaTeX document is built demonstrating its construction line by line. The tutorial is concluded by introducing the audience to some of the nice features of LaTeX. Note: To maximize the benefit from this tutorial, participants are encouraged to bring their laptops with the LaTeX system already installed, along with an editor. (I can provide technical guidance about this if needed). Here is a brief table of the required software:

In this talk, I will describe a new design principle for security: the hardware-up principle. Hardware-up security means that systems should be secured starting from hardware instead of the existing popular approach where software layers are secured, assuming that the lower layers are secure when they are not. I will discuss how systems designed for security from hardware-up offer unique advantages unavailable in current protection systems: a smaller attack surface, energy-efficient execution, and the ability to reason about security compositionally. I will illustrate hardware-up benefits through two case studies. For the first hardware-up case study, I will discuss how we can prevent attackers from taking advantage of unintentional hardware design flaws. Taking microarchitectural side channels as an example, I will discuss a new methodology that computer architects can use to reason micro architectural side-channels at processor design time. Attackers can also intentionally weaken hardware to break systems. In the second case study, I will discuss how hardware itself can be created in a manner that provides assurance that its security has not been compromised due to design-time backdoors. I will describe the first static analysis tool for detecting hardware backdoors and our technique for silencing backdoors. I will mention a prototype built using our technique that incurs less than 8% area overhead and negligible performance overheads. Finally, time permitting, I will describe a hardware malware detector, a first of its kind, that is vastly simpler to implement compared to a traditional software malware detector.