"Welcome and introduction"
CPI Executive Director
In 2019 Dr. N. Asokan joined the University of Waterloo as a Professor of Computer Science and is a David R. Cheriton Chair. Between 1995 and 2012, he worked in industrial research laboratories designing and building secure systems, first at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory as a Research Staff member and then at Nokia Research Centre, most recently as a Distinguished Researcher. Professor Asokan was the founding director of the Helsinki-Aalto Centre for Information Security.
His primary research theme is systems security with a two-pronged approach. The first is on the development and use of novel platform security features, for example, exploring how hardware security mechanisms can be used to protect software more effectively. The second is on the interplay between machine learning techniques to provide better protection, as well as understanding and addressing the security/privacy problems faced by systems based on machine learning. Asokan is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE.
"Do current privacy-enhancing technologies effectively protect people's privacy?" Panelists and Moderator (October 7)
Moderator
University of Waterloo
Florian Kerschbauman is an associate professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (since 2017), a member of the CrySP group, and NSERC/RBC chair in data security (since 2019). He worked as a chief research expert at SAP in Karlsruhe (2005 – 2016) and as a software architect at Arxan Technologies in San Francisco (2002 – 2004). He holds a PhD in computer science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2010) and a master's degree from Purdue University (2001). He served as the inaugural director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (2018 – 2021). He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2019) and a winner of the Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award from CS-Can/Info-Can (2019). He is interested in security and privacy in the entire data science lifecycle. He extends real-world systems with cryptographic security mechanisms to achieve (some) provable security guarantees. His work has been applied to products for databases, supply chain management and RFID tracking.
Royal Bank of Canada
Panelist
Arthur Berrill leads the Royal Bank of Canada Pathfinders team. The Pathfinder team uses research, research tools and partnerships (both internal and external) to define and recommend technology paths of benefit to the bank and in service of the bank’s larger motive of helping clients thrive and communities prosper.
In service of this work, Arthur is involved in most of the data science disciplines including location intelligence, data content, artificial intelligence, ontology, graph analytics and climate change studies.
Arthur is an RBC Distinguished Technologist.
Panelist
Mariana Raykova is a cryptographer research scientist in the Private Computing Group at Google, which develops techniques for privacy preserving computation. Some areas of her research include secure multiparty computation, privacy preserving machine learning, private information retrieval, secure aggregation, zero knowledge proofs, cryptographic obfuscation and others. Prior to joining Google she was a faculty at Yale University and a research scientist at SRI International.
University of British Columbia
Panelist
Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov is a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, where he directs the Laboratory for Education and Research in Secure Systems Engineering. His research interests are usable security, mobile security and privacy, security and privacy in online social networks, and web security. Prior to the University of British Columbia, he was a Security Architect at Hitachi Computer Products (America) and Concept Five. Besides many academic papers, he is also a co-author of “Enterprise Security with EJB and CORBA” and “Mastering Web Services Security” books, as well as XACML and several CORBA security specifications. He has served on program committees and/or helped to organize SOUPS, ACM CCS, IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, NSPW, NDSS, ACSAC, SACMAT. Prof. Beznosov has served as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) and Elsevier’s Computers & Security.
University of Waterloo
Panelist
Anindya Sen is Professor of Economics and Director of the Master of Public Service at the University of Waterloo. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His research interests are the economics of public policy, with an emphasis on estimating the statistical effects of government intervention and imperfectly competitive market structures. In this respect, he has published research on the relationship between market concentration and gasoline prices, the impacts of higher cigarette taxes on smoking, the effects of higher minimum wages on employment and poverty, and the consequences of incentive programs on electricity usage. These papers have been published in peer reviewed journals such as the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Canadian Journal of Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, International Review of Law and Economics, Labour Economics, and Canadian Public Policy.
His current research is focused on the societal implications of data collection and the increased use of artificial intelligence technologies by firms.
His work has extensively covered by The Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, CBC, and The Toronto Star.
"Challenges and Future of Software Security" Panelists and Moderator (October 14)
Moderator
University of Waterloo
Meiyappan (Mei) Nagappan is an Associate Professor and the Current Ross & Muriel Cheriton Faculty Fellow in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
His research is centred around the use of large-scale Software Engineering (SE) data to address the concerns of the various stakeholders (e.g., developers, operators, and managers). He received a Ph.D. in computer science from North Carolina State University. Dr. Nagappan has published in various top SE venues such as TSE, ICSE, FSE, EMSE, JSS, ICSME and IEEE Software. He is an associate editor for EMSE, JSS and TSE and has served on the PC of several conferences like ICSE, MSR, and ICSME. He has also been the PC Co-Chair of MSR 2021, QRS 2020 and Promise 2020.
Queen's University
Panelist
Dr. Steven Ding is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Queen's University.
His research bridges the domain of machine learning, data mining, and cybersecurity. Dr. Ding obtained his Ph.D. from McGill University in 2019, and he was awarded the FRQNT Doctoral Research Scholarship of Quebec and the Dean’s Graduate Award at McGill University. His current research is supported by BlackBerry Cylance and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC).
University of Waterloo
Panelist
Yousra Aafer is an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests span the areas of systems security and software engineering, specifically focusing on mobile and smart device security.
University of Alberta
Panelist
Karim Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.
His research interests are in programming languages, particularly in scalability, precision, and usability of program analysis tools. His work ranges from developing new theories for scalable and precise program analyses to applications of program analysis in security and just-in-time compilers.
BlackBerry
Panelist
Dr. Glenn Wurster is currently Distinguished Security Researcher with BlackBerry.
He has been a member of the Product Security Research Group for 11 years. He works with automotive product teams in BlackBerry, including QNX. He focuses on mitigations research, development, and productization. He also works on secure development initiatives, including methods for vulnerability detection such as static and dynamic analysis. Glenn was the head of the Canadian delegation for the development of ISO 21434, a specification for secure development and operation of automobile electrical and electronic systems. He actively participated in the project working group on product development. He has a Ph.D. from Carleton University. His research interests are in operating systems, firmware, and software security.
"Privacy Research that Matters" Speakers (October 21)
University of Waterloo
Speaker
Professor Goldberg's research spans a number of areas in privacy, security, and cryptography, focusing on privacy enhancing technologies for Internet applications.
In today's highly connected world, where data is so easy to collect, search, and transfer, privacy is of increasing importance. Privacy is more than just controlling the spread and use of one's personal information; privacy, broadly speaking, is about freedom, autonomy, dignity, and human rights. Privacy is about the ability to make one's own choices, discover one's own identity, and participate in like-minded communities, without undue influence from other individuals, corporations, or potentially adversarial governments.
Unfortunately, much communication today, particularly over the Internet, is quite unfriendly to privacy. When you send email, use a chat app, or simply browse the world-wide web, information about you and your actions gets disseminated to diverse parties around the world—and you have little, if any, control over it.
Privacy enhancing technologies (or PETs) aim to mitigate this problem by giving individuals control over the spread of information about their online actions. Professor Goldberg's research produces PETs and other technologies to improve the security and privacy of Internet users. One of his successful projects is Off-the-Record Messaging, which hundreds of thousands of people have used to protect their instant messaging conversations.
University of Waterloo
Speaker
Jennifer Whitson is a sociologist who researches the secret life of software, the people who make it, and how both change our daily lives. Her current projects centre on digital media incubators, indie game makers, and on the surveillance implications of data-driven design, respectively
She's particularly interested in the shifting production models of the global game industry, and tracing how risk management practices, data mining, and digital distribution shape developers' creative work and the larger cultural role of games.
The design, deployment, and use of communication software is shaped by economic, social, technological and political concerns, which then create certain constraints and affordances in how people can use these technologies. For example, her work on gamification traces how governance and control are designed into games, smartphones, and websites, and how playful rationalities are used to shape user behaviour and thus govern through freedom and pleasure rather than fear and risk.
Most recently, she is conducting ethnographic work inside game studios and with developer communities to learn about the struggle for new media producers to find a balance between creative work and economic sustainability, asking "In a 'sharing' community where most digital products like games are low-cost/free, how do we do what we love while still managing to pay the rent?"
"Investigating Targeted Espionage: Methods, Findings, Implications" Speaker (October 28)
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
Ron Deibert is a Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. As director of the Citizen Lab, Deibert has overseen and been a contributing author to over 120 research reports that cover topics such as cyber espionage, commercial spyware, Internet censorship, and human rights. Deibert's written books include published titles such as Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communications in World Order Transformation, Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy and the Dark Side of Cyberspace, and Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Deibert has received awards for his contributions toward teaching at the University of Toronto, for his contributions to Citizen Lab, for his writing contributions, and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee in 2013 for fighting threats against communication rights.