On 26th of October 2012, at the closed workshop on ``Online Security & Civil Rights: a Fine Ethical Balance,'' Hertfordshire, UK, the author put forward the idea that intelligence agencies should work for the People and not for the government. That means that the intelligence agencies should spy on these working in the government and these working for lobbyists.  The recipient of this information should be the public at large. The foundation of this idea comes from the Magna Carta and the US Civil Rights Bill that regard ``We the People'' as the trust worthy party and the government as potentially corrupt. After the Snowden leaks, it has become evident that a discussion is needed on how to reorganize the huge intelligence agencies so that they fit a Western thinking and to avoid they are evolving into a clone of what the KGB and the Stasi used to be. An upodated version of this this lecture was presented at the Security Protocols Workshop, Cambridge on March 20, 2014.

Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have put ubiquitous availability of whole human genomes within reach. It is no longer hard to imagine the day when everyone will have the means to obtain and store one's own DNA sequence. Widespread and affordable availability of whole genomes immediately opens up important opportunities in a number of health-related fields as genomic tests can be conducted in computation. New applications will be developed as genome-enabled medicine becomes increasingly preventive and personalized. However, the very same progress also amplifies worrisome privacy concerns, since a genome represents a treasure trove of highly personal and sensitive information. In this talk, we will overview biomedical advances in genomics and discuss associated privacy, ethical, and security challenges. We begin to address privacy-respecting genomic tests by focusing on some important applications, such as, Personalized Medicine, Paternity Tests, Ancestry Testing, and Genetic Compatibility Tests. After analyzing these applications and their requirements, we propose a set of efficient privacy-enhancing techniques based on private set operations. This allows us to implement, in silico, some operations that are currently performed via in vitro methods, in a secure fashion. Finally, we explore a few alternatives to securely store human genomes and allow authorized parties to run tests in such a way that only the required minimum amount of information is disclosed, and present an Android API framework geared for privacy-preserving genomic testing.

Anonymous Post-office Protocol (AnonPoP) is a messaging protocol ensuring strong anonymity to senders and recipients, even against powerful adversaries. AnonPoP is practical, scalable and efficient, with reasonable overhead in latency and communication. Furthermore, it is appropriate even for use in mobile devices, with modest, reasonable energy consumption (validated experimentally), and with good security even against MitM adversaries and even for disconnection-intersection attacks. To provide anonymity and unobservability even against MitM attackers, AnonPoP uses Post-Office Servers, which keep anonymous mailboxes, and Mixes, between the Post-office and senders/recipients. The Post-Office is aware of the total amount of traffic in the system, but not of traffic patterns of individual senders and recipients. AnonPoP uses efficient cryptographic mechanisms, to ensure anonymity even against a malicious post office, who can also be MitM on all network traffic (and control some mixes).  AnonPop supports many diverse scenarios and applications, with an expressive mailbox authorization policy, including defenses against spam and Denial-of-Service. This is joint work with Nethanel Gelernter. 

This talk enquires into conditions under which cyber attacks are permissible. More specifically, I undertake two tasks. First, I address the kind of harm that is caused by a cyberattack. Existing proposals claim that the harm consists in violation of sovereignty or destruction of information. I argue that the harm is violation of property rights, and show the practical implications of this claim. Second, I address the difficult question of whether offensive cyberattacks are permissible by states against other states and non-state actors. Under conditions where conventions of their use are unsettled, I argue that they are.

Microsoft has a unique reach and responsibility for the online experience of many of the cyberspace citizens of the world.  A dozen years ago Bill Gates demonstrated the leadership of Microsoft software security across the industry by establishing Trustworthy Computing, then an initiative and now an organisation responsible for Security, Privacy, Reliability and Business Practices across the whole of Microsoft.  Back then, security was a matter of rapid response and Matt Thomlinson was an established software engineer building security features into Windows and so he was well placed to conceive Service Pack 2 for XP, a major threshold in Microsoft security. Today Matt is the Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Security and XP SP2 has gone out of support, superseded by many more security step-changes and, the diversification of the cyber threat and defence into Microsoft’s portfolio of products and online services. In his lecture, Matt will discuss the evolution of the cyber security threat from: the origins of hacktivism through web defacement 15 years ago; through the emergence of Worms and their impact on business networks; and the establishment of the BotNet as a new means of organised crime; to the embedding of the targeted attack as an advanced persistent threat.  Through all of these threats Matt has lead research and development of technical and organisational responses based upon his concept of security exploit economics, reframing engineering problems into business solutions.  The adaptation, growth and proactivity of Matt’s organisation in the face of these technical threats could have remained in the domain of engineering. However engagement in the language of risk, regulation and opportunity, was the next key security step for Microsoft. For many years Matt has encouraged engagement on cyber security with Governments and international Institutions to translate software and service issues into the language of policy-makers. Microsoft is in the vanguard on engagement in security standards, information sharing, critical infrastructure protection, capacity building and norms of behaviour in cyberspace.  A future perspective is key to Microsoft’s security strategy and Matt will be announcing the latest in a series of cyber security policy papers, addressing scenarios for the 5 billion citizens of cyberspace in 2025.

Biological systems can provide useful analogies for creating secure cyber systems.  For instance, robustness and resilience in cyber networks can be achieved through dynamic compartmentalization akin to that observed during cell division, and behavior-based threat detection algorithms can examine an environment for disruptors based on their effects, rather than signatures for a known invader.  Social insects offer a model for distributed computing, enabling leaderless control and coordination to solve multi-constraint threat discovery problems.  Biosequences serve as information carriers, allowing the tools of proteomics and genomics to be applied to family tree analysis in software and the identification of common sequences indicative of malicious behaviors or instruction sets.  This seminar will highlight operational cyber security technologies developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory based on each of these techniques.

Embedded systems are increasingly pervasive, interdependent and in many cases critical to our every day life and safety. Tiny devices that cannot afford sophisticated hardware security mechanisms are embedded in complex control infrastructures, medical support systems and entertainment products. As such devices are increasingly subject to attacks, new hardware protection mechanisms are needed to provide the required resilience and dependency at low cost. In this talk, we present and discuss security architectures that aim for flexible hardware-enforced isolation of software modules on (tiny) embedded devices and scales from providing a simple protected firmware runtime to advanced functionality such as attestation.

This research examines a predominantly Australian sample of computer crime offenders involved in fraud and/or unauthorised access. The focus of this presentation is on the extent to which offenders are involved in organised crime, the nature of the relationship between co- offending, initiation and knowledge transmission, and how the online environment facilitates organised crime and co-offending. This qualitative analysis draws from interviews with self- identified offenders, law enforcement officers who investigate these offenses, and court documents, providing a unique understanding of co-offending and organised crime involving computer systems.

Steve is an alumni of the Oxford CS department (well -- the Computing Laboratory) where his primary research was the theory and application of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) - a machine learning technique that is comfortable learning patterns in symbolic logic. One application of ILP was a collaboration with a "computer-hacker" interested in detecting intrusions.  After a "Eureka" moment in the lab, the results were spun-out into a Database Security Company -- Secerno -- which built database firewalls that learned how to protect Relational Databases.  Secerno was acquired by Oracle Corporation. His entrepreneurial journey has taken Steve through all aspects of the IT security sector and he has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.  He remains pessimistic about IT security. In this fire-side style discussion, he will propose a list of topics for the audience to select from and he will give his views on the topics as time permits.