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What's Wrong with Behavioral Advertising?
The Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (ISTS) at Dartmouth College is dedicated to pursuing research and education to advance information security and privacy throughout society. ISTS engages in interdisciplinary research, education and outreach programs that focus on information technology (IT) and its role in society, particularly the impact of IT in security and privacy broadly conceived. ISTS nurtures leaders and scholars, educates students and the community, and collaborates with its partners to develop and deploy IT, and to better understand how IT relates to socio-economic forces, cultural values and political influences.
More than 60 academic IT security leaders from across the northeast converged upon Dartmouth this July 19th-21st to take part in the fourth annual Securing the eCampus conference. This year, eCampus instituted some changes to its program.
The conference was extended from 1.5 to three days, with the first afternoon of the conference providing a new offering. Two training seminars were run for participants, many of whom took advantage of the courses offered. Day two featured the traditional offering of presentations from leaders in the information security field. This year, participants were treated to presentations on privacy, regulations and policy, security awareness, and cyberwar in addition to a panel on cloud computing. The third day included break-out discussions that allowed participants to discuss specific topic areas in smaller groups and in a more informal setting. Topics ranged from e-discovery for higher education, botnets, hacking tools and the hacker curriculum, and social media and the college student.
For more information on the conference, see the eCampus website. All presentations are now available for download.
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Lauren Rosenbaum '11
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Lauren Rosenbaum ’11 will spend the summer term in Kenya funded by an ISTS-Neukom Institute Internship Grant. Lauren will work with Zidisha.org, a recently launched nonprofit, peer-to-peer, microfinance service that allows individuals in the US and Europe to lend directly to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Zidisha is the only international peer-to-peer lending service that allows lenders to communicate and transact with borrowers directly, without intermediaries.
Through her internship, Lauren will work to improve the quality and scale of Zidisha’s services to entrepreneurs in Kenya, by increasing the number of loans lenders are able to fund and identifying ways to make Zidisha more user-friendly and beneficial. She will work to facilitate communication between lenders and borrowers by acting as a “cultural ambassador” to help borrowers know what sort of content to post in their applications and loan weblog entries, and by assisting borrowers to overcome any technical or practical barriers to accessing Zidisha's website and conducting loan disbursement and repayment transactions.
You can follow Lauren’s experience through postings to her blog, “Ikosawa” (Swahili for “it’s all good”).
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Sergey Bratus
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Sergey Bratus, ISTS Chief Security Advisor and Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science, recently received research funding for HYMONT, a Hybrid System Framework for Detecting, Classifying and Mitigating Malicious Outbound Network Traffic Flows.
This award funds research in practical monitoring of large networks for security threats and signs of malicious activity, says Bratus. “When a network carries a lot of traffic—which is the case with any production network of a large or medium-sized organization—the sheer amount of traffic allows attackers to hide in plain sight,” he notes. “We are developing scalable methods of sensing malicious traffic.”
“The current grant continues a line of research projects that we are conducting at the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society, in Sean Smith’s PKI/Trust Lab, and as a part of the Dartmouth Internet Security Testbed (DIST),” says Bratus. Their over-arching goal is “to study and improve trustworthiness and security aspects of networks.”
Bratus will team with Milcord LLC’s network security researchers, who have done pioneering work on detection of botnets. For the full Dartmouth Now article click here.
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Denise Anthony
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David Kotz
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Two Dartmouth researchers are part of a new research endeavor funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) focused on security and privacy in healthcare. The 12-institution consortium, led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of four projects funded by HHS as part of a $60 million initiative called Strategic Healthcare Information Technology Advanced Research Projects (SHARP). Dartmouth will participate in the SHARPS group focused on security.
David Kotz '86, professor of computer science, associate dean for the sciences, and previous director of ISTS, and Denise Anthony, associate professor and chair of sociology and the current director of ISTS, are both members of the project team.
The SHARPS research grant is for $15 million over 4 years. The full Dartmouth press release can be found here and coverage by The Dartmouth here.
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The news and opinion website The Daily Beast recently recognized Dartmouth as the top school in its list of "Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges". The Daily Beast notes, "Our goal was to identify which colleges, compared student-for-student (undergraduate enrollment data courtesy of the National Center for Education Statistics), have turned out the most undergraduates destined for high-tech greatness." See Dartmouth's story on the recognition here.
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