A pair of second-year University of Waterloo students shared the top prize at the inaugural Citizen Hacks, a recent hackathon focused on creating technology to protect privacy.
On April 14, 2019, hackers targeted Stratford City Hall with a ransomware attack, which led to several crucial servers becoming unresponsive and unavailable. The attacker had installed malware on six of the city’s physical servers and on two virtual servers, then encrypted all systems so staff could not access information. The attack affected the city’s email system and online forms.
Professor Ian Goldberg, his colleagues David Wagner, Randi Thomas, and former PhD supervisor Eric Brewer have won the 2019 USENIX Security Test of Time Award for their research that also received the Best Paper Award at the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium in 1996.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have integrated the use of blockchain into energy systems, a development that could result in expanded charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
In a study that outlines the new blockchain-oriented charging system, the researchers found that there is a lack of trust among charging service providers, property owners and owners of electric vehicles (EVs).
CPI would like to announce Chang Ge as the recipient of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute's Graduate Scholarship sponsored by Symcor 2019/2020.
Chang Ge is a PhD student in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo since 2016, advised by Professor Ihab Ilyas. Previously, he obtained a MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2014. His research interest is in the area of data systems, with current interest in managing data quality on private data. His work has been applied in SAP HANA, IBM DB2 and Microsoft Azure Services.
C&O graduate students Samuel Jaques and John Schanck have won the Best Young Researcher Paper Award at Crypto 2019, the 39th Annual International Cryptology Symposium.
Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ian Goldberg has been named a tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He is one of 14 University of Waterloo researchers and the only member from the Faculty of Mathematics to receive this prestigious national research chair in this year’s award cycle.
The Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI) hosted the All Hands On Deck for a Security Incident workshop at True North 2019 and announced their new industry collaboration with CyberCity, a Waterloo Region cybersecurity industry organization.
Originally built as a way to secure cryptocurrency transactions, blockchain is a digital platform that verifies and records exchanges. Blockchains are global networks that can have millions of users, each adding information or data that is secured through cryptography. This creates an indisputable history of these transactions that cannot be modified by a single user, eliminating opportunities for fraud, and it is this feature that has some heralding blockchain as a way of increasing cybersecurity.
A new cybersecurity system developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo has a set a new standard in the fight to protect people from malicious online attacks.
The new tool, a naming system called Bitforest, is one of the first systems that provides an efficient method of decentralized, online security in a way that is easy for the average person to use. The naming system converts more easily remembered names, such as usernames and domain names, to values like public keys needed for securely communicating with computer services and devices.