Congrats to Sadia Nourin for receiving one of only six NSF GRFPs in the field of cybersecurity! It's been a pleasure working with Sadia, and I'm excited to see what's in store for her in the PhD years to come!

Congrats to the 9 U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipients from CMNS this year!

Recipients include #ScienceTerp graduate students and alums from UMD Atmos&Ocean Sci, UMD Biophysics & Chemical Physics Programs, UMD Biological Sciences, UMD Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, UMD Department of Computer Science, UMD Entomology and UMD Math Department.

go.umd.edu/nsf-grfp-24 | #NSFGRFP

The UMD security group is hiring a postdoc. Want to work in applied cryptography and zk proofs with me or Gabe Kaptchuk? Or usable security, ai security, network security, pq crypto, or programing languages + security. Come to UMD and live in Washington, DC. obj.umiacs.umd.edu/cybersecurity/…

Are you a UX developer? Do you want to work on something that *actually* makes the world a Better Place? Look no further than working with the wonderful OTF to help oppressed people around the world more freely communicate.

A groundbreaking study on circumventing China’s latest censorship system conducted by Dave Levin (Dave Levin) and his students won first place in an applied research competition CSAW Cybersecurity Games and Conference
#CSAW23 .

Read more: go.umd.edu/3RreHvQ

My colleague Alan Liu 🏍️ gave a great talk at #HotNets about applying LLMs to help automate internet incident investigation!

This month was the 18th anniversary of the TCP opt-ack attack discovered by Rob Sherwood, which can induce a server to DoS its own link. The opt-ack paper pitched a nice solution, but no solution's been adopted; the Internet remains vulnerable. Maybe next year! kb.cert.org/vuls/id/102014

I'm proud of my BS/MS student Sadia and all she's accomplished in such a short time! She's applying for PhD programs now so keep an eye out!

Anticipated changes to NSF PAPPG for 2024:

- Proposals cannot contain 'As a large language model'

- 'i' cannot come before 'e', before or after 'c'

- Bullets in a bulleted list must be scaled down pictures of green M&Ms. Sub-bullets, brown M&Ms. Sub-sub-bullets are not allowed

Kevin Bock Kevin Bock won the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his work on automating the discovery of new censorship evasion techniques. The tool, Geneva, was his idea and he mentored dozens of undergrad researchers. Couldn't be prouder! censorship.ai

PAPPGs say the darndest things.

I believe in the peer review process.

#soups2023 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award goes to Kelsey R. Fulton! Kelsey Fulton

Our upcoming USENIX Security paper received the 2023 Best Practical Paper award from the FOCI Community. gfw.report/publications/u… Congrats to gfw.report, Jackson, Danesh, Jack, Peter, Shelikhoo, Kevin Bock, Dave Levin, Eric Wustrow. Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences

Congrats to Univ. of Maryland alum Kevin Bock for winning the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He was recognized for his graduate work in developing a novel algorithm that discovers ways to evade nation-state internet censorship.

umiacs.umd.edu/about-us/news/…

US police are selling seized phones with personal data still on them newscientist.com/article/237448…