CCS-AD hosted a day long research round table to develop a cyber security research agenda that focused on problems that are most relevant to the region. To make the region a leader in the cyber security area, the round table explored concrete collaborative research projects that can engage leading cyber security researchers in the region, including researchers from Qatar, KSA, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey. The discussion touched on a wide variety of related topics such as data sharing, test-bed development, and how to attract cyber security talent to the region was also addressed. They discussed roadblocks to effective collaboration and ways to overcome them.

On March 10th, CCS-AD organized a panel discussion at the 2nd International IT Conference 2014. The panel was moderated by Dr. Mustaque Ahamad and entitled Looking Ahead: Cyber Security Challenges and Opportunities. The panelists included: Dr. Mahir Nayfeh, VP at Booz Allen Hamilton, Dr. Iyad Rahwen, Associate Professor at Masdar Institute of Technology, and Ajit Naidu, CIO of Mubadala.
Prior to the discussion, Dr. Nayfeh gave a talk on predictive and proactive threat intelligence systems. Dr. Rahwan addressed the power and dangers of social networks, and Mr. Naidu presented his view on upcoming information security challenges in the corporate environment. The panel discussion was further enhanced by strong audience participation that involved academics, IT professionals, and students.

CCS-AD has been working in the past year to develop a high quality research program that addresses challenges relevant to the UAE and the region. To address this goal CRISSP-AD is organizing a day long meeting to explore research collaborations among researchers in UAE universities who work in the broad field of cyber security and privacy. The goal of this meeting is to develop ambitious and high impact research projects and to explore how they can be supported to generate research results of highest quality. More specifically, we would like to discuss how to develop joint funding proposals, build testbeds, and gain access to data that could be used for evaluating our research results.

The two teams received an expense-paid trip to New York City to compete in the 2013 CSAW @ NYU HSF competition finals on November 15, 2013. Both teams were performed very well and ranked right after the top three teams among 12 competing teams. We thank all the students and their mentor teachers for participating in the High School Forensics challenge. This year’s HSF competition has been one of the largest high school cyber security events in the world! We like to note that in its first year in Abu Dhabi more than 70 teams from all across the UAE have registered for the HSF’13. We hope everyone had fun and found the challenge to be a worthwhile learning activity. For more information on please visit the HSF site.

CCS-AD has been established to facilitate cyber security research, education and practice in the UAE. In its inaugural workshop, CRISSP-AD hosts cyber security experts from government and industry as well as academics from leading institutions of the region, to address emerging threats in cyber security and how the various stakeholders can work together to address them. In addition to developing a collaborative research agenda, the workshop also focuses on developing human capital in the UAE to deal with the shortage of cyber security professionals.

The 2nd Do You Trust Your Chip workshop, sponsored by CCS-AD, focused on Hardware Security. Experts from industry (Intel, IBM, SRC) and academia (Carnegie Mellon, Duke University, University of Texas at Dallas etc.) presented the latest advancements in the field of Hardware Security. Topics ranged from Secure cloud computing to Detection of counterfeit IC electronics, providing a wide variety of new topics to the audience.