Naveed and Zhou pose with the session host NYU-Poly Ph.D. student Kevin Gallagher.
A security informatics team won third prize for best paper at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW). Informatics Ph.D. student Xiaoyong Zhou, the lead author, worked with School of Informatics and Computing doctoral students Yeonjoon Lee and Nan Zhang and University of Illinois computer science Ph.D. student Muhammad Naveed on the paper.
CSAW is the world’s largest student cyber security contest, which brings together the best young hackers and top researchers in cybersecurity.
The team’s paper focused on the security implications in Android fragmentation. They discovered several vulnerabilities that affect millions of phones worldwide caused by Android fragmentation: each mobile phone manufacturer has different customized software and hardware.
Some of the susceptibilities allow malicious applications to log the keystrokes on the screen, take screenshots, or take pictures without user consent. Such weaknesses could include anything displayed on the screen, including a user’s account name and password.
The vulnerabilities were reported to Google and Samsung. As a token of appreciation, Samsung awarded the authors with latest Samsung devices for future research. Visit Zhou’s website for more information, including videos and graphs,on their findings.
This year, three winners were selected from 80 published papers.
“Not only does this showcase the strength of IU’s system security research, which has already been recognized as one of the best in the nation, it is also a recognition for IU students, whose achievements continuously receive attentions domestically and internationally,” said the team’s advisor, SoIC Associate Professor of Informatics and Computer Science XiaoFeng Wang.
CSAW was the culmination of several months of preliminary competitions. The 11th annual Cyber Security Awareness Week brought hundreds of student finalists to Brooklyn from across the United States, Canada, and beyond, from November 12 to 15, to test their skills in hacking, protection, and detection. In yet other CSAW competitions, some of the world’s best young researchers presented their work; others designed government policy to protect the emerging Internet of Things—interconnected electronic devices found in more and more homes and offices.