Internet of Things

Mason, Amazon collaboration to deliver innovations in education and research

Colleen Rich — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 17:03:01 +0000

Mason, Amazon collaboration to deliver innovations in education and research Colleen Rich Mon, 11/28/2022 - 12:03

��AV and Amazon have entered into a strategic collaboration that will allow the university to better serve students, advance its commitment to a more sustainable campus environment, and introduce new educational programs in data center engineering.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

By leveraging technical solutions from Amazon Web Services’ cloud services, Mason will develop a unified platform to improve the process for students from community colleges to transfer into the university. The seamless process will support Mason’s commitment to access by eliminating obstacles related to enrollment and transfer, ensuring systematic barriers do not prevent student success.

Mason faculty, students, staff, and public-sector and industry partners can also expect the development of new approaches to address food insecurity, reduce the technical skills gap in data center engineering, and advance environmental priorities. In the coming years, students will be able to access these novel programs and new curriculum that will help learners pursue careers in data center engineering across the greater Washington metropolitan area, where there is an increasing need for mechanical and electrical engineering talent.

Mason is among the largest producers of tech talent in Virginia, with 40% of students majoring in STEM fields. The university is ranked No. 1 in the commonwealth and No. 9 nationally among public institutions for innovation by U.S. News and World Report.

“The diverse talent pipeline that ��AV produces is in part what attracted Amazon to Arlington,” Mason President Gregory Washington said of the company’s construction of a headquarters in the city. “Mason’s work with Amazon will better serve the students in that pipeline as well as drive economic growth through business, government and community collaborations as Mason becomes one of the most technologically advanced, inclusive universities in the nation.”

As Mason works with Amazon Web Services to implement enhanced, high-performance computing and machine learning, it also will accelerate its research capabilities and provide new platforms for innovation, including an increased collaboration with the intelligence community to drive research and new discoveries with artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5G technology.

In total, this unique collaboration will deliver a secure, cloud-based environment for university, industry and government mission partners to conduct cutting-edge research.

"This is just the beginning of a powerful collaboration," said Amazon's Paul Misener. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services

"In this long-term initiative, customer services and resources from across Amazon will accelerate innovation at Virginia's largest public research university, including by helping Mason innovate and build on the vast portfolio of AWS Cloud technologies and solutions,” said Paul Misener, vice president for global innovation policy and communications at Amazon. “This is just the beginning of a powerful collaboration that not only will improve student outcomes, but also will create a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable future for the university.”

The newly announced projects will add to an already strong collaborative effort between Mason, AWS, and Amazon to support students and innovation.

A just-completed hackathon co-hosted by Mason and Amazon, a project based out of the university’s Mason Square in Arlington, Virginia, challenged teams from U.S. and international academic institutions, companies, and other affiliations to develop innovative ideas to improve public-private collaborations against the industry-wide global challenge of counterfeiting.

Mason Square is also the future home of Mason’s Fuse building, a 345,000-square-foot facility that will open in 2025 as the flagship tech hub for digital innovation, showcasing the power of partnerships in the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, connecting students, faculty, industry, and government.

Additionally, AWS’ Girls Tech Day in Northern Virginia was held at Mason’s Science and Technology Campus with the goal of inspiring girls and women to pursue careers in the technology sector. And Mason President Gregory Washington recently participated in a panel discussion, hosted by Amazon, that focused on workforce development and the future of work.

“��AV has proven to be a leading education institution in the nation’s capital for a number of years,” said Kim Majerus, vice president, U.S. education, state and local government at AWS. “As one of the first universities to launch a cloud computing degree program, Mason has always seen how the power of technology can help meet mission outcomes. This collaboration will be transformative in showing the positive impact technology can have on the education community across the nation, as well as advance research in cybersecurity, defense, and military intelligence for public-sector leaders.”

Topics

New scoring framework addresses software vulnerabilities

Tama Moni — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 17:50:54 +0000

New scoring framework addresses software vulnerabilities Tama Moni Tue, 10/25/2022 - 13:50

In This Story

Massimiliano Albanese

Liza Wilson Durant

The ��AV College of Engineering and Computing has launched the Mason Vulnerability Scoring Framework (MVSF), which publishes a continuously updated ranking of the most-common global software weaknesses. The work, in conjunction with PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), relies on the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST)—Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures data and other sources of vulnerability information to create an up-to-date database that can be used to identify and mitigate risks. This line of work has resulted in multiple pending patent applications and a Best Paper Award at the 19th International Conference on Security and Cryptography.

Cybersecurity code with 1s and 0s
Photo provided by iStock images

Liza Wilson Durant, Mason’s associate provost for strategic initiatives and community engagement, says, "This preemptive tool to guide strategic defense against cybersecurity vulnerabilities will not only safeguard systems but mitigate potential business revenue losses for those who leverage the tool. “

An existing list called the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses, compiled by The MITRE Corporation, has long been the industry standard. MVSF improves on the CWE Top 25 by having data input monthly, compared to MITRE’s yearly reporting. This improvement allows researchers, programmers, developers, and others to have an accurate, almost real-time picture of where software vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited. Additionally, where MITRE ranks the top 25 vulnerabilities, MVSF ranks the top 150.

Associate Professor, Department of Information Sciences and Technology and Associate Director, Center for Secure Information Systems, Max Albanese oversees the project for Mason. He says, “If there is a trend where a certain type of vulnerability is becoming more severe, you don’t have to wait for a full year to discover that; you’ll see that class of vulnerability getting worse – or better – month-to-month.” MVSF can even correct course based on new information, going back and re-ranking weaknesses’ order in a previous month based on new information that was not known at the time of original ranking.

Albanese further notes that NIST assigns a severity score to vulnerabilities based on a combination of an exploitability score – how difficult the vulnerability is to exploit – and an impact score – how bad the consequences would be if the vulnerability were exploited. MVSF uses those components as variables but allows users to add their own, additional variables not considered by NIST. MVSF also allows users to decide how to weigh the variables that rank the vulnerabilities. This customizability, still under development, is an important feature of the new system.

Mason and PARC’s collaboration on the Mason Vulnerability Scoring Framework builds on a relationship that started with both of them working on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project dubbed SCIBORG: Secure Configurations for the Internet of Things (IoT) based on Optimization and Reasoning on Graphs. The goal of SCIBORG was to devise fundamentally new approaches to determine security configurations that protect critical infrastructure and IoT-based systems.

The association with PARC here was important to making the project a success. “Working with GMU was a productive collaboration,” says Marc Mosko, principal scientist, PARC. “Configuration vulnerabilities are growing, now comprising over 15 percent of all Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) notices. We appreciate that across many different industry sectors, there are often gaps in context between management, software security teams, and those who are responsible for ensuring systems are performing optimally on an ongoing basis. Our work addresses these evolving configuration security needs, and we look forward to exploring opportunities to apply this work in the future.”

Mason and PARC’s collaboration on the Mason Vulnerability Scoring Framework builds on a relationship that started with both of them working on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program ConSec in a project dubbed SCIBORG: Secure Configurations for the Internet of Things (IoT) based on Optimization and Reasoning on Graphs. The goal of SCIBORG was to devise fundamentally new approaches to determine security configurations that protect critical infrastructure and IoT-based systems.

Albanese, who is also an external consultant for MITRE, has initiated a collaboration with MITRE’s group responsible for CWE to leverage synergies between the two organizations.

In addition to the excitement of the innovation, it is equally impactful to see undergraduate students involved in its design and implementation and innovating alongside their mentor faculty," says Wilson Durant.

The Virginia Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) will provide continued support for two Mason undergraduate students to assist with the project, which Albanese says is key for the continued maintenance of the system.

Topics

cryptography

configuration vulnerabilities

Internet of Things

Information Sciences and Technology Department

Research

CEC faculty research

Expanding the internet of things

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 15:17:31 +0000

Expanding the internet of things Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/25/2021 - 11:17

In This Story

Parth Pathak

Wireless connectivity on our smartphones, wearables, and laptops keeps us connected to everyone, but it often ties us to outlets as our devices recharge. The faster our search results come in, the more energy-hungry our digital devices become, creating a tradeoff of speed for energy efficiency.

Parth Pathak, an assistant professor of computer science, received a National Science Foundation CAREER award to look at breaking the cycle by using existing technology to create a new high-speed and low-power solution to expand the capabilities in wireless connectivity.

Parth Pathak is innovating existing technologies to expand the capabilities of the internet of things.

“There are two trends in wireless connectivity. One is the wireless networks you would see in an iPhone, incredibly fast but also very energy hungry. The other trend uses extremely low-power networks, like those used in EZ passes and other automated tolls, but they are slow in communication,” Pathak says.

But this divergence is limiting. A low-power and high-speed solution would allow everyday items to be added to the wireless network, like our water bottles, pens, notebooks—the possibilities are endless. “This is the vision of the internet of things, to have the things we see around us connected,” says Pathak.

His work entitled, “CAREER: Unifying Millimeter-wave Networking and Sensing Using Commodity Backscatter” uses backscattering techniques to reflect high speed 5G signals. Backscatter objects, like EZ passes and RFIDs, don’t have their own independent way of communicating. Instead, when another device transmits, they take that signal coming in, modify it, and communicate back, says Pathak.

Since objects would reflect a signal instead of transmitting one on their own, it drastically reduces the energy it needs, says Pathak. “Think of it like using a mirror. When there is sunlight, the sun is transmitting, and I use a mirror with two sides – reflecting or not – to send that sunlight to you, forming a stream of 0s and 1s. The mirror is not using much energy, except for flipping sides or producing any signal. It is intuitively backscattering an existing signal.”

In this case, the sunlight is a 5G network signal, which transmits information over millimeter-wave wireless signals. Millimeter-waves are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that are high frequency and high speed, but they also pose some challenges.

“Since the millimeter-wave signals are so high frequency, it is challenging to ensure the right balance between energy and speed,” says Pathak. So, he and his research team are developing new algorithms and protocols specifically for these high-speed wireless networks.

Because their work uses existing infrastructure such as the 5G cellular and the next-generation WiFi networks, it would also be low-cost and easily implemented. “We are creating a very efficient and cost-effective way of expanding the possibilities of wireless,” says Pathak.

“We are rapidly becoming a society centered around ubiquitous wireless communication and sensing, but the pace of change is hampered by the power consumption needs of wireless devices. Parth’s research will tackle this challenge through an innovative approach to exploiting reflected 5G network signals for important low-power sensing applications such as proximity detection and contact tracing,” says Department of Computer Science chair David Rosenblum.