NCSU SoS Lablet Quarterly Executive Summary

A. Fundamental Research
High level report of result or partial result that helped move security science forward-- In most cases it should point to a "hard problem". These are the most important research accomplishments of the Lablet in the previous quarter.

We continued to produce science of security outcomes. The following are the major contributions from Lablet projects.

• We completed CDL, a classified distributed learning framework for security attack detection in container-based systems. CDL has been accepted for presentation at ACM ACSAC 2020.
• We advanced our analysis of the CPTC 2019 and CPTC 2018 competition data. Our ML classifier so far achieves precisions and recalls of over 70% on a sample dataset.
• With a focus on studying contact tracing protocols, we developed a framework to analyze Proximity-based Contact Tracing (PCT) protocols. We have identified two main dimensions along with which different designs for PCT protocols can be made.
• We completed a systematic literature review of research works on mining threat intelligence from unstructured textual data. Our paper will appear in the proceedings of the Deep Learning Cybrethreat Intelligence workshop at the International Conference on Data Mining.
• We extended our scope from spying to unexpected information gathering (UIG) in mobile apps, and identified 124 UIG-enabling apps from our current dataset of apps. We identified an additional 131 UIG-enabling apps in a snowball fashion.
• We continued to engage with the security community. We have begun a new study that will supplement our interview data by analyzing the comments left by reviewers on submissions to the HoTSoS conference.

B. Community Engagement(s)
Research interaction in the community including workshops, seminars, competitions, etc.

We brought up the Science of Security in a variety of fora, including

• Presentations at and discussions with colleagues at academic conferences.
• We have assisted in the instrumentation for the CPTC 2020 competition. Our capacity is reduced from last year to focus on analyzing existing data.
• Discussions with a local startup, Airgap Inc., regarding secure manufacturing.

C. Educational Advances
Impact to courses or curriculum at your school or elsewhere that indicates an increased training or rigor in security research.