The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Results from the January 2018 SFS Research Study at UMBC

Enis Golaszewski, CSEE, UMBC

12:00-1:00pm Friday, 12 October 2018, ITE 227

January 22-26, 2018, UMBC SFS scholars worked collaboratively to analyze the security of a targeted aspect of the UMBC computer system. The focus of this year’s study was the WebAdmin module that enables users to perform various functions on their accounts, including changing the password. Students identified vulnerabilities involving failure to sanitize user input properly and suggested mitigations. Participants comprised BS, MS, MPS, and PhD students studying computer science, computer engineering, information systems, and cybersecurity, including SFS scholars who transferred from Montgomery College (MC) and Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) to complete their four-year degrees at UMBC. We hope that other universities can benefit from our motivational and educational strategy of cooperating with the university’s IT staff to engage students in active project-based learning centering on focused questions about the university computer system.

Enis Golaszewski is a PhD student and SFS scholar in computer science working with Dr. Sherman on blockchain, protocol analysis, and the security of software-defined networks.

This project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576.

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public.

MD-AI Meetup holds 1st event at UMBC
6-8pm Wed 10/3, 7th floor library

A new Maryland-based meetup interest group has been established for Artificial Intelligence (MD-AI Meetup) and will have its first meeting at UMBC this coming Wednesday (Oct 3) from 6:00-8:00pm in the 7th floor of the library.  The first meeting will feature a talk by UMCP Professor Phil Resnik on the state of NLP and an AI research agenda.  Refreshments will be provided.  The meetup is organized by Seth Grimes and supported by TEDCO, local AI startup RedShred, and the Maryland Tech Council.

If you are interested in attending this and possibly future meetings (which will probably be monthly), go to the Meetup site and join (it’s free) and RSVP to attend this meeting (if there’s still room).  If you join the meetup and RSVP, you can see who’s registered to attend.

These meetups are good opportunities to meet and network with people in the area who share interests. It’s a great opportunity for students who are will be looking for internships or jobs in the coming year.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: A Technical Chat with the Defense Information Systems Agency

James Curry
Lead Engineer–DoD Cyber Security Range
Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)

12:00–1:00pm Friday, 28 September 2018, ITE 227, UMBC

A broad reaching brief on the scope and scale of the DISA Mission, followed by a dive into DISA’s efforts to develop Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to help defend the nation’s cyber infrastructure. Attendees are highly encouraged to ask questions.

James Curry is the Lead Engineer of the DoD Cyber Security Range (CSR). The CSR’s mission is to replicate the DoD Information Network (DODIN) environment at lab scale, while maintaining high-fidelity realism. As Lead Engineer, Mr. Curry led the design, acquisition, and implementation of two first-of-its-kind technologies: a Virtual Internet Access Point (vIAP) and a Virtual Joint Regional Security Stack (vJRSS). These technologies enable the DoD Workforce to train in an IaaS-on-demand environment that realistically matches DISA’s core infrastructure. Mr. Curry is a Scholarship for Service (SFS) recipient (2008-2009) and received his masters and bachelors of science in computer science from New Mexico Tech. Email:

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming meetings for Fall 2018 include the following.

• Oct 12 Enis Golaszewski, The 2018 UMBC SFS study
• Oct 26 Enis Golaszewski, Using tools in the formal analysis of cryptographic protocols
• Nov 9 Razvan Mintesu, Legal aspects privacy
• Dec 7 Tim Finin, A knowledge graph for cyber threat intelligence

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Phishing in an Academic Community:
a Study of User Susceptibility and Behavior

Alejandra Diaz
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

12:00–1:00pm, Friday, 14 September 2018, ITE 227

(joint work with Alan T. Sherman Anupam Joshi)

We present an observational study on the relationship between demographic factors and phishing susceptibility at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). From March through May 2018, we performed three experiments that delivered phishing attacks to 450 randomly-selected students on three different days (1,350 students total) to examine user click rates and demographics within UMBC’s undergraduate student population. The participants were initially unaware of the study. We deployed the Billing Problem, Contest Winner, and Expiration Date phishing tactics. Experiment 1 impersonated banking authorities; Experiment 2 enticed users with monetary rewards; and Experiment 3 threatened users with account cancellation.

We found correlations resulting in lowered susceptibility based on college affiliation, academic year progression, cyber training, involvement in cyber clubs or cyber scholarship programs, amount of time spent on the computer, and age demographics. We found no significant correlation between gender and susceptibility. Contrary to our expectations, we observed an inverse correlation between phishing awareness and student resistance to clicking a phishing link. Students who identified themselves as understanding the definition of phishing had a higher susceptibility rate than did their peers who were merely aware of phishing attacks, with both groups of students having a higher susceptibility rate than those with no knowledge whatsoever. Overall, approximately 70% of the students who opened a phishing email clicked on it.

Alejandra Diaz () is a cyber software engineer at Northrop Grumman. She earned her BS in computer science from UMBC with a concentration in cybersecurity in May 2017, and her MS in computer science in August 2018. As a Cyber Scholar and a Society of Women Studying Information Security Scholar, she has a special interest in the human aspects of cybersecurity.

Host: Alan T. Sherman,

Support for this research was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 1241576, the U.S. Department of Defense under CAE grant H988230-17-1-0349, and IBM.

NSA highlights strong partnership with UMBC in Featured School campaign

Over the past two decades, UMBC and the National Security Agency (NSA) have developed a strong relationship, which has led to research, internship, and career opportunities for faculty, students, and alumni. UMBC is the first institution to be highlighted in NSA’s Featured School Series, which launched on September 4.

“UMBC’s long-standing partnership with NSA has provided valuable experiences for our students, faculty, and alumni to pursue internships, careers, and collaborative research opportunities,” said President Freeman Hrabowski. “Through this work we are helping to address the need for well-trained cyber professionals by creating a network of talented people to protect the state, nation, and world.”

More than 1100 NSA employees are UMBC alumni, including Darniet Jennings ‘98, M.S. ‘99, Ph.D. ‘03, information systems management. Jennings continued his dissertation research when he took a job at NSA, where he developed a system to manage big data effectively, which was patented in 2010.

The opportunities at NSA include careers in a broad range of disciplines including cybersecurity, engineering, computer science, language, and biological and chemical sciences. Regina Hambleton ‘87, mathematics, has held a number of positions at NSA and is currently the Agency’s deputy director of Engagement and Policy. She began working at NSA while she was a student at UMBC, and participated in a program that allowed her to spend a semester at UMBC taking courses followed by a semester working at NSA.

The partnership between NSA and UMBC also helps prepare an increasing number of graduates for careers in cybersecurity-related fields, to protect the nation from cyber threats.

Charles Nicholas, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is also highlighted in the Featured School Series campaign. He has spent two sabbaticals at NSA during his time at UMBC, and has mentored students who completed NSA internships, in addition to students who went on to pursue careers at NSA. Nicholas is interested in the intersection of cybersecurity and data science, and the tools that are used to compare malware specimens.

“There are so many opportunities in the intelligence community, including at NSA,” Nicholas says. “It is important for students interested in those careers to develop technical ability, as well as critical and creative thinking, and I enjoy the chance to help them grow those skills.”

For more information about the partnership, and a few UMBC alumni who work at NSA, visit the UMBC page on the NSA website.

Adapted from a UMBC News article by Megan Hanks. Banner image by Marlayna Demond for UMBC.

Ballerina, a modern programming language
focused on integration

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana
Founder, Chairman and Chief Architect, WSO2

2:00-3:00pm, Thursday, 6 September 2018, ITE325, UMBC

Ballerina is a concurrent, transactional, statically typed programming language. It provides all the functionality expected of a modern, general purpose programming language, but it is designed specifically for integration: it brings fundamental concepts, ideas and tools of distributed system integration into the language with direct support for providing and consuming network services, distributed transactions, reliable messaging, stream processing, security and workflows. It is intended to be a pragmatic language suitable for mass-market commercial adoption; it tries to feel familiar to programmers who are used to popular, modern C-family languages, notably Java, C# JavaScript.

Ballerina’s type system is much more flexible than traditional statically typed languages. The type system is structural, has union types and open records with optional/mandatory fields. This flexibility allows it also to be used as a schema for the data that is exchanged in distributed applications. Ballerina’s data types are designed to work particularly well with JSON; any JSON value has a direct, natural representation as a Ballerina value. Ballerina also provides support for XML and relational data.

Ballerina’s concurrency model is built on the sequence diagram metaphor and offers simple constructs for writing concurrent programs. Its type system is a modern type system designed with sufficient power to describe data that occurs in distributed applications. It also includes a distributed security architecture to make it easier to write applications that are secure by design.

Ballerina is designed for modern development practices with a modularity architecture based on packages that are easily shared widely. Version management, dependency management, testing, documentation, building and sharing are part of the language design architecture and not left for later add-on tools. The Ballerina standard library is in two parts: the usual standard library level functionality (akin to libc) and a standard library of network protocols, interface standards, data formats, authentication/authorization standards that make writing secure, resilient distributed applications significantly easier than with other languages.

Ballerina has been inspired by Java, Go, C, C++, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, Dart, Typescript, Javascript, Swift and other languages. This talk will discuss the core principles behind Ballerina including the semantics of combining aspects of networking, security, transactions, concurrency and events into a single architecture.

Sanjiva Weerawarana founded WSO2 in 2005 with a vision to reinvent the way enterprise middleware is developed, sold, delivered, and supported through an open source model. Prior to starting WSO2, Sanjiva worked for nearly eight years in IBM Research, where he focused on innovations in middleware and emerging industry standards. At IBM, he was one of the founders of the Web services platform, and he co-authored many Web services specifications, including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF, and WS-Eventing. In recognition for his company-wide technical leadership, Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003.

Sanjiva also has been committed to open source development for many years. An elected member of the Apache Software Foundation, Sanjiva was the original creator of Apache SOAP, and he has contributed to Apache Axis, Apache Axis2 and most Apache Web services projects.

In 2003, Sanjiva founded the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF), a non-profit organization formed with the objective of promoting open source development, not usage, by Sri Lankan developers. He is currently its chief scientist and a director. LSF’s success stories include many Apache Web services projects and Sahana, the predominant disaster management system in the world. In recognition of his role in promoting open source participation from developing countries, Sanjiva was elected to the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in April 2005, where he served for two years.

Sanjiva also teaches and guides student projects part-time in the Computer Science & Engineering department of the University of Moratuwa, and he is a member of the university’s Faculty of Engineering Industry consultative board. Prior to joining IBM, Sanjiva spent three years at Purdue University as visiting faculty, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994.

Game Developers Club Fall 2018
Opening Meeting and Game Jam

The UMBC Game Developer’s Club (GDC) explores the art and science of game development in a club environment and includes members from many backgrounds, including computing, digital art, computer modeling and music composition.

Their first meeting will start next week at 1pm on Friday, September 7th, in Engineering 005a. This meeting will kick off their annual Fall Game Jam, where participants will have a chance to propose game ideas, form teams, and develop a prototype over the course of the weekend (9/7 through 9/9).

The meeting will start with announcements and a brief presentation about the club for new members, followed by game idea proposals and the Game Jam itself. If you want to propose an idea for the Game Jam, be ready to give a brief presentation on the following things on September 7th:

• A 1-2 sentence summary of your idea
• What you want to have done by the end of the game jam
• What team roles you still need to fill
• Whether it will be 2D/3D/no preference
• Game engine preference (if any)

Methods and Models: Data Science for Campus Parking

Professor John Hoag
Associate Professor, Ohio University
11:15-12:15pm Monday, 13 August 2018 in ITE 325B

How can data science improve the parking experience for students, faculty, and staff? Or are there other motives at work? This talk will define and approach this perennial campus problem from perspectives of telematics and modeling, starting with the “Smart Cities” life cycle of data collection and analysis – from best practices through optimization. Next, we will consider relevant probabilistic models and their implementations over a century of study. We will conclude by discussing unintended consequences such as LPRs and other outcomes.

Dr. John Hoag is Associate Professor of Information and Telecommunication Systems at Ohio University in Athens, OH. He earned Ph.D. and M.S. Degrees in Operations Research from Ohio State University and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. His current portfolio can be termed Smart Cities, which subsumes transportation, energy, finance, public health, and more, for which he is forming interdisciplinary public-private teams whose scope encompasses data collection, telemetry, storage, and analysis. The Smart Cities displaced work he started in bioinformatics and translational biomedical science, where his efforts focused on computational complexity and system performance. He maintains an adjunct appointment in EECS at Case Western Reserve University.

Host: Dr. Richard Forno ()

CMSC 201 Computer Science I for Non-CS Disciplines – Fall 2018

This fall, Dr. Susan Mitchell will teach a special section of CMSC 201 Computer Science I designed for social and biological sciences *and other majors*. The course will cover the same content and have the same rigor as the regular sections of CMSC 201 and prepare students to continue on to CMSC 202 if they wish.  As with other sections, it fulfills any major’s requirement for CMSC 201. The key difference will be that the assignments and projects will emphasize topics applicable to many non-CS disciplines, such as statistical analysis, working with large data sets, and data visualization. The catalog description is:

An introduction to computer science through problem solving and computer programming. Programming techniques covered by this course include modularity, abstraction, top-down design, specifications documentation, debugging and testing. The core material for this course includes control structures, functions, lists, strings, abstract data types, file I/O, and recursion.

The course will include a lecture from 2:30pm to 3:45pm on Mondays and Wednesdays (Section 36-LEC) and a one-hour lab on either Monday (Section 37-DIS) or Wednesday (Section 38-DIS) from 11:00-11:50am.

Permission from the instructor is required to register for this section. No prior programming experience is required. The only prerequisite is that students must have completed MATH 150, 151 or 152 with a C or better; OR have MATH test placement into MATH 151; OR be concurrently enrolled in MATH 155 or completed it with a C or better.

For permission or questions, email Dr. Susan Mitchell at

UMBC receives $5.4m in funding for new cybersecurity projects

NSF and NSA Fund Three Cybersecurity Projects by Prof. Alan Sherman 

Professor Alan Sherman and colleagues were recently awarded more than $5.4 million dollars in three new grants to support cybersecurity research and education at UMBC, including two from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and one from the National Security Agency (NSA).  Dr. Sherman leads UMBC’s Center for Information Security and Assurance which was responsible for UMBC’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Research and Education.

This summer, NSF funded Sherman’s second CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) grant (Richard Forno, CoPI) that will fund 34 cybersecurity scholars over five years and support research at UMBC and in the Cyber Defense Lab (CDL). The $5 million award supports scholarships for BS, MS, MPS, and PhD students to study cybersecurity through UMBC degree programs in computer science, computer engineering, cyber, or information systems. SFS scholars receive tuition, books, health benefits, professional expenses, and an annual stipend ($22,500 for undergraduates, $34,000 for graduate students). In return, each scholar must engage in a summer internship and work for government (federal, state, local, or tribal) for one year for each year of support. The program is highly competitive and many of the graduates now work for the NSA.

A novel aspect of UMBC’s SFS program is that it builds connections with two nearby community colleges—Montgomery College (MC) and Prince Georges Community College (PGCC). Each year, one student from each of these schools is selected for a scholarship. Upon graduation from community college, the student transfers to UMBC to complete their four-year degree. In doing so, UMBC taps into a significant pool of talent and increases the number of cybersecurity professionals who will enter government service. Each January, all SFS scholars from UMBC, MC, and PGCC engage in a one-week research study. Working collaboratively, they analyze a targeted aspect of the security of the UMBC computer system. The students enjoy the hands-on experience while helping to improve UMBC’s computer security. Students interested in applying for an SFS scholarship should consult the CISA SFS page and contact Professor Sherman. The next application deadline is November 15.

With $310,000 of support from NSF, Sherman and his CoPIs, Drs. Dhananjay Phatak and Linda Oliva, are developing educational Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) to measure student understanding of cybersecurity concepts. In particular, they are developing and validating two concept inventories: one for any first course in cybersecurity, and one for college graduates beginning a career in cybersecurity. These inventories will provide science-based criteria by which different approaches to cybersecurity education can be assessed (e.g., competition, gaming, hands-on exercises, and traditional classroom). This project is collaborative with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

With $97,000 of support from NSA, Sherman is developing a virtual Protocol Analysis Lab that uses state-of-the-art tools to analyze cryptographic protocols for structural weaknesses. Protocols are the structured communications that take place when computers interact with each other, as for example happens when a browser visits a web page. Experience has shown that protocols are so complicated to analyze that there is tremendous value in studying them using formal methods. Sherman and his graduate students are making it easier to use existing tools including CPSA, Maude NPA, and Tamerin, applying them to analyze particular protocols, and developing associated educational materials.