All posts by Frank Stajano

Security course at Cambridge

I have taken over the second-year Security course at Cambridge, which is traditionally taught in Easter term. From the end of April onwards I will be teaching three lectures per week. Taking advantage of the fact that Cambridge academics own the copyright and performance rights on their lectures, I am making all my undergraduate lectures available at no charge on my YouTube channel frankstajanoexplains.com. My lecture courses on Algorithms and on Discrete Mathematics are already up and I’ll be uploading videos of the Security lectures as I produce them, ahead of the official lecturing dates. I have uploaded the opening lecture this morning. You are welcome to join the class virtually and you will receive exactly the same tuition as my Cambridge students, at no charge. 


The philosophy of the course is to lead students to learn the fundamentals of security by “studying the classics” and gaining practical hands-on security experience by recreating and replicating actual attacks. (Of course the full benefits of the course are only reaped by those who do the exercises, as opposed to just watching the videos.)


This is my small contribution to raising a new generation of cyber-defenders, alongside the parallel thread of letting young bright minds realise that security is challenging and exciting by organising CTFs (Capture-The-Flag competitions) for them to take part in, which I have been doing since 2015 and continue to do. On that note, any students (undergraduate, master or PhD) currently studying in a university in UK, Israel, USA, Japan, Australia and France still have a couple more days to sign up for our 2022 Country to Country CTF, a follow-up to the Cambridge to Cambridge CTF that I co-founded with Howie Shrobe and Lori Glover at MIT in 2015. The teams will mix people at different levels so no prior experience is required. Go for it!

Towards greater ecological validity in security usability

When you are a medical doctor, friends and family invariably ask you about their aches and pains. When you are a computer specialist, they ask you to fix their computer. About ten years ago, most of the questions I was getting from friends and family as a security techie had to do with frustration over passwords. I observed that what techies had done to the rest of humanity was not just wrong but fundamentally unethical: asking people to do something impossible and then, if they got hacked, blaming them for not doing it.



So in 2011, years before the Fido Alliance was formed (2013) and Apple announced its smartwatch (2014), I published my detailed design for a clean-slate password replacement I called Pico, an alternative system intended to be easier to use and more secure than passwords. The European Research Council was generous enough to fund my vision with a grant that allowed me to recruit and lead a team of brilliant researchers over a period of five years. We built a number of prototypes, wrote a bunch of papers, offered projects to a number of students and even launched a start-up and thereby learnt a few first-hand lessons about business, venture capital, markets, sales and the difficult process of transitioning from academic research to a profitable commercial product. During all those years we changed our minds a few times about what ought to be done and we came to understand a lot better both the problem space and the mindset of the users.

Continue reading Towards greater ecological validity in security usability

Raising a new generation of cyber defenders

 

Over the past few years we launched and ran two university-level hacking competitions in  order to attract bright students to our field, with the long term goal of addressing the skills gap in cyber security.

Analysts estimate that, globally, over the next few years, in the field of cyber security there will be a gap of over a million people between the positions that need filling and the people with the skills to fill those positions.

In 2015 we founded the international Cambridge2Cambridge cyber security challenge, in collaboration with MIT CSAIL, which first took place at MIT, and then in 2016 the UK-level Inter-ACE among the UK ACE-CSRs, which first took place at the University of Cambridge. The Inter-ACE has now expanded beyond the ACEs and the C2C admits university students from anywhere in the world. None of this would have been possible without strong cooperation between academia, government and industry. We are grateful to our many supporters, who are all credited in the report.

After three years, my precious collaborators Graham Rymer and Michelle Houghton have moved on to new jobs and it is time for someone else to pick up the torch. To help our successors, today we publish a comprehensive technical report distilling our experience running these events for the past three years. We wrote it for all those who share
our vision and goals and who wish to take these competitions forward: we hope they will find it useful and it will help them make future editions even better. It contains a detailed chronicle of what we did and an extensive list of lessons learnt. Attendees of the Security and Human Behavior 2018 workshop will have heard me speak about some of the associated challenges, from fostering cooperation to redressing gender balance to preventing cheating, with detours into Japanese swordsmanship and Plato.

The extensive appendices contain a wealth of training material including write-ups of our practice CTFs and of the Inter-ACE 2018 for which we developed the problems in-house, as well as the latest course notes for the binary reverse engineering training seminar that we ran in Cambridge several times over the years, initially for our own students and then for hundreds of ACE-CSR participants.

We hope you will enjoy our report and that it will inspire you to contribute to future events in this series, whether as a participant, host or supporting institution, and keep the momentum going.

Frank Stajano, Graham Rymer, Michelle Houghton. “Raising a new generation of cyber defenders—The first three years of the Cambridge2Cambridge and Inter-ACE cyber security competitions”. University of Cambridge Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-922, June 2018, 307 pages. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-922.pdf

 

Cambridge2Cambridge 2017

Following on from various other similar events we organised over the past few years, last week we hosted our largest ethical hacking competition yet, Cambridge2Cambridge 2017, with over 100 students from some of the best universities in the US and UK working together over three days. Cambridge2Cambridge was founded jointly by MIT CSAIL (in Cambridge Massachusetts) and the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (in the original Cambridge) and was first run at MIT in 2016 as a competition involving only students from these two universities. This year it was hosted in Cambridge UK and we broadened the participation to many more universities in the two countries. We hope in the future to broaden participation to more countries as well.

Cambridge 2 Cambridge 2017 from Frank Stajano Explains on Vimeo.

We assigned the competitors to teams that were mixed in terms of both provenance and experience. Each team had competitors from US and UK, and no two people from the same university; and each team also mixed experienced and less experienced players, based on the qualifier scores. We did so to ensure that even those who only started learning about ethical hacking when they heard about this competition would have an equal chance of being in the team that wins the gold. We then also mixed provenance to ensure that, during these three days, students collaborated with people they didn’t already know.

Despite their different backgrounds, what the attendees had in common was that they were all pretty smart and had an interest in cyber security. It’s a safe bet that, ten or twenty years from now, a number of them will probably be Security Specialists, Licensed Ethical Hackers, Chief Security Officers, National Security Advisors or other high calibre security professionals. When their institution or country is under attack, they will be able to get in touch with the other smart people they met here in Cambridge in 2017, and they’ll be in a position to help each other. That’s why the defining feature of the event was collaboration, making new friends and having fun together. Unlike your standard one-day hacking contest, the ambitious three-day programme of C2C 2017 allowed for social activities including punting on the river Cam, pub crawling and a Harry Potter style gala dinner in Trinity College.

In between competition sessions we had a lively and inspirational “women in cyber” panel, another panel on “securing the future digital society”, one on “real world pentesting” and a careers advice session. On the second day we hosted several groups of bright teenagers who had been finalists in the national CyberFirst Girls Competition. We hope to inspire many more women to take up a career path that has so far been very male-dominated. More broadly, we wish to inspire many young kids, girls or boys, to engage in the thrilling challenge of unravelling how computers work (and how they fail to work) in a high-stakes mental chess game of adversarial attack and defense.

Our platinum sponsors Leidos and NCC Group endowed the competition with over £20,000 of cash prizes, awarded to the best 3 teams and the best 3 individuals. Besides the main attack-defense CTF, fought on the Leidos CyberNEXS cyber range, our other sponsors offered additional competitions, the results of which were combined to generate the overall teams and individual scores. Here is the leaderboard, showing how our contestants performed. Special congratulations to Bo Robert Xiao of Carnegie Mellon University who, besides winning first place in both team and individuals, also went on to win at DEF CON in team PPP a couple of days later.

We are grateful to our supporters, our sponsors, our panelists, our guests, our staff and, above all, our 110 competitors for making this event a success. It was particularly pleasing to see several students who had already taken part in some of our previous competitions (special mention for Luke Granger-Brown from Imperial who earned medals at every visit). Chase Lucas from Dakota State University, having passed the qualifier but not having picked in the initial random selection, was on the reserve list in case we got funding to fly additional students; he then promptly offered to pay for his own airfare in order to be able to attend! Inter-ACE 2017 winner Io Swift Wolf from Southampton deserted her own graduation ceremony in order to participate in C2C (!), and then donated precious time during the competition to the CyberFirst girls who listened to her rapturously. Accumulating all that good karma could not go unrewarded, and indeed you can once again find her name in the leaderboard above. And I’ve only singled out a few, out of many amazing, dynamic and enthusiastic young people. Watch out for them: they are the ones who will defend the future digital society, including you and your family, from the cyber attacks we keep reading about in the media. We need many more like them, and we need to put them in touch with each other. The bad guys are organised, so we have to be organised too.

The event was covered by Sky News, ITV, BBC World Service and a variety of other media, which the official website and twitter page will undoubtedly collect in due course.

Inter-ACE national hacking competition today

Over 100 of the best students in cyber from the UK Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research are gathered here at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory today for the second edition of our annual “Inter-ACE” hacking contest.

The competition is hosted on the CyberNEXS cyber-range of our sponsor Leidos, and involves earning points for hacking into each other’s machines while defending one’s own.   The competition has grown substantially from last year’s: you can follow it live on Twitter (@InterACEcyber) At the time of writing, we still don’t know who is going to take home the trophy. Can you guess who will?

The event has been made possible thanks to generous support from the National Cyber Security Centre, the Cabinet Office, Leidos and NCC Group.

CFP: Passwords 2016

====================================================================
Call for Papers
The 11th International Conference on Passwords
PASSWORDS 2016

5-7 December 2016
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

https://passwords2016.rub.de/
https://passwordscon.org/
====================================================================

The Passwords conference was launched in 2010 as a response to
the lack of robustness and usability of current personal
authentication practices and solutions. Annual participation has
doubled over the past three years. Since 2014, the conference
accepts peer-reviewed papers.

* IMPORTANT DATES *

Research papers and short papers:
– Title and abstract submission: EXTENDED TO 2016-08-22 2016-07-04  (23:59 UTC-11)
– Paper submission: EXTENDED TO 2016-08-29 2016-07-11 (23:59 UTC-11)
– Notification of acceptance: 2016-10-17 2016-09-05
– Camera-ready from authors: 2016-10-31 2016-09-19

Hacker Talks:
– Talk proposal submission: 2016-09-15 (23:59 UTC-11)
– Notification of acceptance: 2016-09-30

* CONFERENCE AIM *

More than half a billion user passwords have been compromised
over the last five years, including breaches at internet
companies such as Target, Adobe, Heartland, Forbes, LinkedIn,
Yahoo, and LivingSocial. Yet passwords, PIN codes, and similar
remain the most prevalent method of personal
authentication. Clearly, we have a systemic problem.

This conference gathers researchers, password crackers, and
enthusiastic experts from around the globe, aiming to better
understand the challenges surrounding the methods personal
authentication and passwords, and how to adequately solve these
problems. The Passwords conference series seek to provide a
friendly environment for participants with plenty opportunity to
communicate with the speakers before, during, and after their
presentations.

* SCOPE *

We seek original contributions that present attacks, analyses,
designs, applications, protocols, systems, practical experiences,
and theory. Submitted papers may include, but are not limited to,
the following topics, all related to passwords and
authentication:

– Technical challenges and issues:
– Cryptanalytic attacks
– Formal attack models
– Cryptographic protocols
– Dictionary attacks
– Digital forensics
– Online attacks/Rate-limiting
– Side-channel attacks
– Administrative challenges:
– Account lifecycle management
– User identification
– Password resets
– Cross-domain and multi-enterprise system access
– Hardware token administration
– Password “replacements”:
– 2FA and multifactor authentication
– Risk-based authentication
– Password managers
– Costs and economy
– Biometrics
– Continous authentication
– FIDO – U2F
– Deployed systems:
– Best practice reports
– Incident reports/Lessons learned
– Human factors:
– Usability
– Design & UX
– Social Engineering
– Memorability
– Accessibility
– Pattern predictability
– Gestures and graphical patterns
– Psychology
– Statistics (languages, age, demographics…)
– Ethics

* INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS *

Papers must be submitted as PDF using the Springer LNCS format
for Latex. Abstract and title must be submitted one week ahead of
the paper deadline.

We seek submissions for review in the following three categories:

– Research Papers
– Short Papers
– “Hacker Talks” (talks without academic papers attached)

RESEARCH PAPERS should describe novel, previously unpublished
technical contributions within the scope of the call. The papers
will be subjected to double-blind peer review by the program
committee. Paper length is limited to 16 pages (LNCS format)
excluding references and well-marked appendices. The paper
submitted for review must be anonymous, hence author names,
affiliations, acknowledgements, or obvious references must be
temporarily edited out for the review process. The program
committee may reject non-anonymized papers without reading
them. The submitted paper (in PDF format) must follow the
template described by Springer at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

SHORT PAPERS will also be subject to peer review, where the
emphasis will be put on work in progress, hacker achievements,
industrial experiences, and incidents explained, aiming at
novelty and promising directions. Short paper submissions should
not be more than 6 pages in standard LNCS format in total. A
short paper must be labeled by the subtitle “Short
Paper”. Accepted short paper submissions may be included in the
conference proceedings. Short papers do not need to be
anonymous. The program committee may accept full research papers
as short papers.

HACKER TALKS are presentations without an academic paper
attached. They will typically explain new methods, techniques,
tools, systems, or services within the Passwords scope. Proposals
for Hacker Talks can be submitted by anybody (“hackers”,
academics, students, enthusiasts, etc.) in any format, but
typically will include a brief (2-3 paragraphs) description of
the talk’s content and the person presenting. They will be
evaluated by a separate subcommittee led by Per Thorsheim,
according to different criteria than those used for the refereed
papers.

At least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register
and present the paper at the workshop. Papers without a full
registration will be withdrawn from the proceedings and from the
workshop programme.

Papers that pass the peer review process and that are presented
at the workshop will be included in the event proceedings,
published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer
Science (LNCS) series.

Papers must be unpublished and not being considered elsewhere for
publication. Plagiarism and self-plagiarism will be treated as a
serious offense.  Program committee members may submit papers but
program chairs may not.  The time frame for each presentation
will be either 30 or 45 minutes, including Q&A. Publication will
be by streaming, video and web.

* ORGANIZERS *

– General chair: Per Thorsheim, God Praksis AS (N)
– Program co-chair and host: Markus Dürmuth, Ruhr-University Bochum (DE)
– Program co-chair: Frank Stajano, University of Cambridge (UK)

* PROGRAM COMMITTEE *

– Adam Aviv, United States Naval Academy (USA)
– Lujo Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
– Jeremiah Blocki, Microsoft Research/Purdue University (USA)
– Joseph Bonneau, Stanford University (USA)
– Heather Crawford, Florida Institute of Technology (USA)
– Bruno Crispo, KU Leuven (B) and University of Trento (IT)
– Serge Egelman, ICSI and University of California at Berkeley (USA)
– David Freeman, LinkedIn (USA)
– Simson Garfinkel, NIST (USA)
– Tor Helleseth, University of Bergen (N)
– Cormac Herley, Microsoft Research (USA)
– Graeme Jenkinson, University of Cambridge (UK)
– Mike Just, Heriot-Watt University (UK)
– Stefan Lucks, Bauhaus-University Weimar (D)
– Paul van Oorschot, Carleton University (CA)
– Angela Sasse, University College London (UK)
– Elizabeth Stobert, ETH Zurich (CH)

* STEERING COMMITTEE *

– Per Thorsheim, God Praksis AS (N)
– Stig F. Mjolsnes, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (N)
– Frank Stajano, University of Cambridge (UK)

More and updated information can be found at the conference website
https://passwords2016.rub.de/

And the winners are…

inter-ace-logo4

The Inter-ACE Cyberchallenge on Saturday was fantastic. The event saw nearly twice as many competitors as attended the C2C competition in Boston recently, engaged in solving the most artful challenges. It was great to see so many students interested in cyber security making the effort to travel from the four corners of the UK, a few from as far away as Belfast!

IMG_5373The competition was played out on a “Risk-style” world map, and competing teams had to fight each other for control of several countries, each protected by a fiendish puzzle. A number of universities had also submitted guest challenges, and it was great that so many teams got involved in this creative process too. To give one example; The Cambridge team had designed a challenge based around a historically accurate enigma machine, with this challenge protecting the country of Panama. Competitors had to brute-force the settings of the enigma machine to decode a secret message. Other challenges were based around the core CTF subject areas of web application security, binary reverse engineering and exploitation, forensics, and crypto. Some novice teams may have struggled to compete, but they would have learned a lot, and hopefully developed an appetite for more competition. There were also plenty of teams present with advanced tool sets and a solid plan, with these preparations clearly paying off in the final scores.

IMG_5426

Between the 10 teams, their coaches, the organisers and the reporters, the lab was bustling with excitement and that intense feeling of hackers “in the zone” for the whole afternoon.

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I have nothing but praise for our partners Facebook, who worked hard on setting the challenges and making the CTF game run smoothly, as well as feeding the participants with pizza and endowing the prizes with hacking books and goodie bags.

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The biggest thanks go to the ACE-CSRs who enthusiastically supported this initiative despite the short notice. 40 students came to Cambridge to compete in the live event in teams of 4, and another 40+ competed remotely in the individuals.

 

In retrospect we should have organised a “best T-shirt” competition. I especially liked Facebook t-shirts “Fix more, whine less” and “s/sleep/hack/g” but the one I would have voted overall winner (despite not technically being a T-shirt) was Southampton’s Shakespearian boolean logic.

IMG_5310

It is with a mixture of pride and embarrassment that I announce the winners, as Cambridge won the gold in both the team and individual events.

IMG_5686

Team event:

  • 1st place (Gold): University of Cambridge
    Stella Lau, Will Shackleton, Cheng Sun, Gábor Szarka
  • 2nd place (Silver): Imperial College London
    Matthieu Buffet, Jiarou Fan, Luke Granger-Brown, Antoine Vianey-Liaud
  • 3rd place (Bronze): University of Southampton
    Murray Colpman, Kier Davis, Yordan Ganchev, Mohit Gupta

 

Individual event:

  • 1st place (Gold): Dimitrije Erdeljan, University of Cambridge
  • 2nd place (Silver): Emma Espinosa, University of Oxford
  • 3rd place (Bronze): David Young, University of Southampton

IMG_5346

I shall ignore allegations of having rigged the game except to say that yes, we did train our students rather extensively in preparation for the previously-mentioned Cambridge 2 Cambridge event with MIT. All of our winners are Cambridge undergraduates in computer science who had done well in the qualifiers for C2C. Two of them had actually been to Boston, where Gábor had been on the winning team overall and earned one gold and two silver medals, while Will (also former UK Cyber Security Challenge winner) had earned one gold, one silver and two bronze medals. Well deserved thanks also to my modest but irreplaceable collaborator Graham Rymer who designed and delivered an effective and up-to-date ethical hacking course to our volunteers. The Cambridge success in this weekend’s competition gives promising insights into the effectiveness of this training which we are gearing up to offering to all our undergraduates and potentially to other interested audiences in the future.

IMG_5359

We are once again grateful to everyone who took part. We are also grateful to the Cabinet Office, to EPSRC and to GCHQ for support that will allow us to keep the event running and we hereby invite all the ACEs to sharpen their hacking tools for next year and come back to attempt to reconquer the trophy from us.

Inter-ACE cyberchallenge at Cambridge

The best student hackers from the UK’s 13 Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research are coming to Cambridge for the first Inter-ACE Cyberchallenge tomorrow, Saturday 23 April 2016.

inter-ace-logo4
The event is organized by the University of Cambridge in partnership with Facebook. It is loosely patterned on other inter-university sport competitions, in that each university enters a team of four students and the winning team takes home a trophy that gets engraved with the name of their university and is then passed on to the next winning team the following year.
trophies
Participation in the Inter-ACE cyberchallenge is open only to Universities accredited as ACEs under the EPSRC/GCHQ scheme. 10 of the 13 ACEs have entered this inaugural edition: alphabetically, Imperial College, Queens University Belfast, Royal Holloway University of London, University College London, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge (hosting), University of Kent, University of Oxford, University of Southampton, University of Surrey. The challenges are set and administered by Facebook, but five of the ten competing insitutions have also sent Facebook an optional “guest challenge” for others to solve.
The players compete in a CTF involving both “Jeopardy-style” and “attack-defense-style” aspects. Game progress is visualized on a world map somewhat reminiscent of Risk, where teams attempt to conquer and re-conquer world countries by solving associated challenges.
We designed the Inter-ACE cyberchallenge riding on the success of the Cambridge2Cambridge cybersecurity challenge we ran in collaboration with MIT last March. In that event, originally planned following a January 2015 joint announcement by US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron, six teams of students took part in a 24-hour Capture-The-Flag involving several rounds and spin-out individual events such as “rapid fire” (where challengers had to break into four different vulnerable binaries under time pressure) and “lock picking”, also against the clock and against each other. The challenges were expertly set and administered by ForAllSecure, a cybersecurity spin-off from Carnegie Mellon University.
C2C Updated Header- 3.7.16-1
With generous support from the UK consulate in Boston we were able to fly 10 Cambridge students to MIT. By design, we mixed people from both universities in each team, to promote C2C as an international cooperation and a bridge-building exercise. Thanks to the generosity of the many sponsors of the event, particularly Microsoft who funded the cash prizes, the winning team “Johnny Cached”, consisting of two MIT and two Cambridge students, walked away with 15,000 USD. Many other medals were awarded for various achievements throughout the event. Everyone came back with a sense of accomplishement and with connections with new like-minded and highly skilled friends across the pond.
9-2-with-medals
In both the C2C and the Inter-ACE I strived to design the rules in a way that would encourage participation not just from the already-experienced but also from interested inexperienced students who wanted to learn more. So, in C2C I designed a scheme where (following a pre-selection to rank the candidates) each team would necessarily include both experienced players and novices; whereas in Inter-ACE, where each University clearly had the incentive of picking their best players to send to Cambridge to represent them, I asked our technical partners Facebook to provide a parallel online competition that could be entered into remotely by individual students who were not on their ACE’s team. This way nobody who wanted to play is left out.
Industry and government (ours, but probably also those of whatever other country you’re reading this blog post from) concur that we need more cybersecurity experts. They can’t hire the good ones fast enough. A recent Washington post article lamented that “Universities aren’t doing enough to train the cyberdefenders America desperately needs”. Well, some of us are, and are taking the long term view.
As an educator, I believe the role of a university is to teach the solid foundations, the timeless principles, and especially “learning how to learn”, rather than the trick of the day; so I would not think highly of a hacking-oriented university course that primarily taught techniques destined to become obsolete in a couple of years. On the other hand, a total disconnect between theory and practice is also inappropriate. I’ve always introduced my students to lockpicking at the end of my undergraduate security course, both as a metaphor for the attack-defense interplay that is at the core of security (a person unskilled at picking locks has no hope of building a new lock that can withstand determined attacks; you can only beat the bad guys if you’re better than them) and to underline that the practical aspects of security are also relevant, and even fun. It has always been enthusiastically received, and has contributed to make more students interested in security.
I originally accepted to get involved in organizing Cambridge 2 Cambridge, with my esteemed MIT colleague Dr Howie Shrobe, precisely because I believe in the educational value of exposing our students to practical hands-on security. The C2C competition was run as a purely vocational event for our students, something they did during evenings and weekends if they were interested, and on condition it would not interfere with their coursework. However, taking on the role of co-organizing C2C allowed me, with thanks to the UK Cabinet Office, to recruit a precious full time collaborator, experienced ethical hacker Graham Rymer, who has since been developing a wealth of up-to-date training material for C2C. My long term plan, already blessed by the department, is to migrate some of this material into practical exercises for our official undergraduate curriculum, starting from next year. I think it will be extremely beneficial for students to get out of University with a greater understanding of the kind of adversaries they’re up against when they become security professionals and are tasked to defend the infrastructure of the organization that employs them.
Another side benefit of these competitions, as already remarked, is the community building, the forging of links between students. We don’t want merely to train individuals: we want to create a new generation of security professionals, a strong community of “good guys”. And if they met each other at the Inter-ACE when they were little, they’re going to have a much stronger chance of actively collaborating ten years later when they’re grown-ups and have become security consultants, CISOs or heads of homeland security back wherever they came from. Sometimes I have to fight with narrow-minded regulations that would only, say, offer scholarships in security to students who could pass security clearance. Well, playing by such rules makes the pool too small. For as long as I have been at Cambridge, the majority of the graduates and faculty in our security research group have been “foreigners” (myself included, of course). A university that only worked with students (and staff, for that matter) from its own country would be at a severe disadvantage compared to those, like Cambridge, that accept and train the best in the whole world. I believe we can only nurture and bring out the best student hackers in the UK in a stimulating environment where their peers are the best student hackers from anywhere else in the world. We need to take the long term view and understand that we cannot reach critical mass without this openness. We must show how exciting cybersecurity is to those clever students who don’t know it yet, whatever their gender, prior education, social class, background, even (heaven forbid) those scary foreigners, hoo hoo, because it’s only by building a sufficiently large ecosystem of skilled, competent and ethically trained good guys that employers will have enough good applicants “of their preferred profile” in the pool they want to fish in for recruitment purposes.
My warmest thanks to my academic colleagues leading the other ACE-CSRs who have responded so enthusiastically to this call at very short notice, and to the students who have been so keen to come to Cambridge for this Inter-ACE despite it being so close to their exam season. Let’s celebrate this diversity of backgrounds tomorrow and forge links between the best of the good guys, wherever they’re from. Going forward, let’s attract more and more brilliant young students to cybersecurity, to join us in the fight to make the digital society safe for all, within and across borders.

Three exciting job openings in security usability

We are looking for three more people to join the Cambridge security group. Two job adverts, intended for postgrads or postdocs, are already out now. A third one, specifically aimed at a final year undergraduate or master student, strong on programming but with no significant work experience, is currently making its way through the HR pipeline and should appear soon. Please pass this on to anyone potentially interested.

With the Pico project (see website for videos, papers and more) we wish to liberate humanity from the usability and security problems of passwords. We are looking for a UX designer to help us in our quest to produce a user-centred, effective and pleasant to use solution and for two software engineers with a security mindset to help us build it and make it robust against attacks. Would you like to join us and contribute to eliminating the annoyance and frustration of passwords from the daily experience of billions of computer users?
  1. User experience (UX) designer
    Research Associate or Assistant (with/without PhD)
    Start date: ASAP
    Details and link to application form: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/9244/
  2. Senior software engineer / software engineer
    Research Associate or Assistant (with/without PhD)
    Start date: ASAP
    Details and link to application form: http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/9245/
  3. Software engineer
    Research assistant (having just completed a bachelor or master in CS/EE)
    Start date: June 2016
    Watch this space: the ad should go live within a week or so
    https://www.mypico.org/jobs/