Resiliency

BUILDING AN OPTIMISTIC FUTURE BY PREPARING FOR THE WORST

Whether they’re designing urban infrastructure able to withstand extreme climate eventsor online systems robust enough to meet ever-increasing challenges, Tandon researchersconsider resiliency to be at the core of their work.

Joining forces to train a new generation of cybersecurity and resiliency experts

The quantity, velocity, and variety of cybersecurity attacks worldwide reflect the proliferation of connected devices; advances in extended reality systems, AI, telecommunications; and global supply chains powered by the Internet. At the same time, firms around the world are focused on enhancing their resiliency capabilities to effectively respond to and recover from disruptive events, including cybersecurity incidents and events related to supply chain, third-party providers, applications, and platforms.

Today, there is a shortfall of cybersecurity and resiliency experts with real-world training and immersion in cutting-edge research and technology to face these challenges. Working together, CCS and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a financial services industry giant with nearly five decades of technology, resiliency and cybersecurity expertise, aim to change that.

With leadership from Professor Nasir Memon (CSE, co-founder of CCS, and Vice Dean for Student and Academic Affairs, Tandon Online) and Senior Director Joel Caminer (CCS), the groups are collaborating to enhance the center’s reputation as a hub of thought leadership, attracting world-class researchers and producing a new generation of cybersecurity and resiliency experts, with a special focus on designs, solutions, and technologies for making systems more resilient to ever-evolving threats.

The partnership will be built on three pillars — research, education & workforce development, and dissemination & outreach — and aims to expand the pool of Ph.D. students researching cybersecurity and resiliency at Tandon. It will also design and develop resiliency curricula at the undergraduate and graduate levels and generate academic/industry/government collaborations and events to amplify the work being done at the center.

TANDON RESEARCHERS ARE EXPOSING THE FLAWS UNDERWRITING AI-GENERATED CODE

Last year, GitHub — a Microsoft subsidiary that provides tools for coders — released an early version of its newest tool, Copilot. The program provides a way to generate code automatically, using the user’s own code as a kind of guiding light — drastically reducing the amount of time programmers would spend doing laborious coding.

However, Research Assistant Professor Hammond Pearce (ECE, CCS) found that the code produced by Copilot could be surprisingly buggy. Working with Professor Ramesh Karri (ECE and co-founder and co-chair of CCS), Assistant Professor Brendan Dolan-Gavitt (CSE, CCS), and Ph.D. student Baleegh Ahmad, he created 89 security-themed scenarios for Copilot to craft code for, resulting in 1,689 programs. When the researchers analyzed the results, they found that 40 percent were faulty in some way, leaving potential infiltration points for hackers and bad actors and potentially exposing things like passwords and other vital data.

“If you have someone who is not security-conscious writing, this tool may reinforce that tendency and help them write code that introduces even more errors,” says Dolan-Gavitt. “It can have a multiplication effect.”

Their paper, “Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code,” was highly cited, and was selected to receive a Distinguished Paper Award at this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the most important cybersecurity convention in the world.

Better next-G wireless Among the teams’ research priorities: telecommunications

Lightning-fast, low-latency wireless, from 5G to 6G and beyond, will enable such services as virtual and augmented reality streaming, vehicle-to-cloud communications to help self-driving cars navigate in real time, remote surgery, coordination of automated systems in factories and other facilities, and a plethora of futuristic consumer apps. But it will also open a Pandora’s box of security vulnerabilities in the hardware serving as its backbone and software driving its networks.

The NSF Resilient and Intelligent Next Generation Systems (RINGS) initiative has awarded three teams of researchers at NYU Tandon a combined $2.5 million to confront these challenges head on.

Tandon students on multiple wireless devices during a lecture in Fall 2022.

Together, the projects — being undertaken at NYU WIRELESS, CCS, and CATT — will focus on making current and future wireless infrastructure, software and hardware systems more resilient to flaws, accidents, subterfuge and hacks.

Among the teams’ research priorities:

• Flagging so-called hardware Trojans (malicious additions to hardware components supplied by a third party in order to launch an attack from within a network node, such as a cellular base station), making it easier to detect jamming and multi-user attacks, and developing a novel evaluation platform for exploring hardware security methods at different regions of the radio spectrum.

• Building more resilient edge networks (those in which computation and data storage capabilities are as close as possible to the source of a request), thereby enabling secure, robust, and high-performance applications in education, business, transportation, healthcare, entertainment and more.

• Ensuring the resilient delivery of real-time interactive services over NextG computer-rich mobile networks, making it possible to improve automation schemes for smart factories and farms, among other settings, as well as enhanced augmented/virtual reality.

A more powerful power grid

U.S. power systems represent an increasingly desirable target for cyber hackers. An IBM report noted that “the energy industry was the third most targeted sector for such attacks in 2020, behind only finance and manufacturing.” To address this issue, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded NYU Tandon a three-year, ~$2 million grant to develop a new program for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities

Tandon researchers received a $2M Department of Energy grant to secure the power grid.

in power grids. Dubbed Tracking Real Time Anomalies in Power Systems, or TRAPS, the NYU initiative will be a collaborative effort with researchers at SRI International, the New York Power Authority, Narf Industries, and Consolidated Edison. NYU’s efforts will be overseen by Professor Farshad Khorrami (ECE), with Professor Ramesh Karri (ECE, CCS) and Research Scientist Prashanth Krishnamurthy (ECE) as co-investigators.

Farshad Khorrami

Ramesh Karri

In announcing the awards, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm notes that, “investing in cutting-edge cyber security technology keeps us at the forefront of global innovation and protects America’s power grid in the face of increasing cyber threats from abroad.” She adds, “This funding will bolster our commitment to a secure and resilient clean energy future by fortifying American electricity systems and building a stronger grid.”

NYU WIRELESS celebrates 10 years of advancing wireless communications.

A decade of connection

NYU WIRELESS, an innovative academic research center with a focus on 6G and beyond, was launched Theodore Rappaport in 2012, by Founding Director and Professor Theodore “Ted” Rappaport (ECE, Courant, and the NYU School of Medicine), who pioneered the use of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, paving the way for the powerful cell phones and other wireless devices most of us now use.

The world’s first academic research center to combine engineering, computer science, and medicine, NYU WIRELESS is now under the direction of Distinguished Industry Professor Thomas Marzetta (ECE), who led the development of massive MIMO (multipleinput multiple-output), another core component of modern wireless networks.

Along with their fellow NYU WIRELESS researchers, the two, who were so instrumental in enabling 5G, are now exploring new parts of the radio spectrum, developing new technologies, forging new partnerships, and turning their attention to the next generation of mobile communications. They predict a time when autonomous vehicles communicate seamlessly with one another, remote medical devices allow a surgeon to treat a patient on the other side of the world, and wireless signals can be sent at the rate of human computation. Meanwhile, as they look ahead, in honor of NYU WIRELESS’s 10th anniversary, we’re taking a look back.

5 reasons to celebrate 10 years of NYU WIRELESS

1. Research

• NYU WIRELESS researchers develop a technology, streamloading, that could ultimately make spotty streaming and data hogging downloads a thing of the past (2013)

• NYU WIRELESS researchers receive the IEEE Donald G. Fink Award for the seminal paper “Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work” (2015)

• NYU WIRELESS releases a groundbreaking new NYUSIM Channel Simulator that provides a complete statistical channel model and simulation code with an easy-to-use interface for generating realistic spatial and temporal wideband channel impulse responses (2016)

• Research shows real potential for the mmWave band in rural areas, with waves traveling more than 10 kilometers (2016)

• The Federal Communications Commission grants NYU WIRELESS an early “Program Experimental License” for cutting-edge work throughout the radio spectrum​ (2017)

• Researchers at CATT and NYU WIRELESS build the world’s first wireless emulator suitable for 5G systems that feature massive bandwidths and hundreds of antenna elements (2017)

• NYU WIRELESS researchers help unveil new ways of enhancing the performance of electrochemical micro-sensors — a discovery that could lead to the detection of biomolecules, such as dopamine, at lower concentrations than is possible today (2021)

2. Collaboration and Community

• Nokia and NYU WIRELESS bring the first-ever 5G Summit, now one of the premiere annual events in the wireless world, to Brooklyn (2014)

• Ted Rappaport keynotes a major Federal Communications Commission hearing on mmWaves at the Workshop on Spectrum Frontiers and Technological Developments (2016) and is appointed to serve on the Commission’s Technological Advisory Council (2019)

• NYU WIRELESS is chosen by an NSF and industry consortium to participate in the “Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research” program, with the aim of testing new ways of boosting internet speeds to support dataintensive applications in robotics, immersive virtual reality, and traffic safety. The result is a project called COSMOS (Cloud Enhanced Open Software-Defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment), which allowed researchers to explore wide-ranging applications, including connected vehicles, in a dense, urban area (2018)

• NYU WIRELESS is selected to participate in ComSenTer, a collaboration among the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and industry partners (2018)

• NYU WIRELESS participates in the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, making NYU Tandon the only U.S.-based university member (2018)

• NYU WIRELESS becomes the first academic institution to join the mmWave Coalition, whose mission is to advocate for the use of radio frequencies above 95 GHz in the U.S. (2018)

3. Leadership

Thomas Marzetta

Distinguished Industry Professor Thomas Marzetta (ECE and Director of NYU WIRELESS)

• is honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society with its Industrial Innovation Award for “originating the concept of Massive MIMO, and for sustained contributions to the development and promotion of that technology” (2017)

• is elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2020)

Theodore Rappaport

Founding Director and Professor Theodore “Ted” Rappaport (ECE, Courant, and the NYU School of Medicine)

• is elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2018)

• becomes the first-ever career academic elected to the Wireless Hall of Fame (2019)

• is elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2021)

Faculty Accomplishments

Elza Erkip

Institute Professor Elza Erkip (ECE)

• is listed among the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters (2014)

• is recognized by the Women in Communications Engineering Standing Committee for her outstanding technical work in the field of communications engineering, and for having achieved a high degree of visibility in the field (2016)

• is elected president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Information Theory Society (2018)

• wins the Technical Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society (2019)

• wins the Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award (2021)

Sundeep Rangan

Professor Sundeep Rangan (ECE and Associate Director of NYU WIRELESS)

• is named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2015)

• wins the Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award (2020)

Yong Liu

Professor Yong Liu (ECE)

• Is named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2017)

Shivendra Panwar

Professor Shivendra Panwar (ECE and Director of CATT)

• Is honored by IIT Kanpur with their Distinguished Services Award

Dennis Shasha

Professor Dennis Shasha (Courant and Associate Director of NYU WIRELESS)

• is named an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow for his technical and literary contributions to the field of data management (2014)

5. Grants and Funding

• The NSF, Empire State Development, and corporate backers award NYU WIRELESS $2M to develop a 5G network (2012)

• National Instruments donates nearly $1 million in hardware and software to NYU WIRELESS to accelerate 5G research (2017)

• NYU WIRELESS is awarded a $2.3 million contract with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to work on mmWave communications for public safety, as part of an initiative aimed at advancing broadband technologies for first responders (2017)

• Keysight donates the largest in-kind gift to NYU WIRELESS and Tandon in the history of the School (2018)

Battling conspiracy theories

In a first-of-its-kind study, C4D researchers have also found that YouTube channels with conspiracy content are fertile ground for predatory advertisers–with conspiracy channels having nearly 11 times the prevalence of likely predatory or deceptive ads when compared to mainstream YouTube channels and being twice as likely to feature non-advertising ways to monetize content, such as donation links for Patreon, GoFundMe and PayPal.

Tandon researchers work to bring clarity to the fore

Researchers also discovered that:

• Certain scams were more common. Self-improvement ads, many of them get-rich-quick schemes, were seen more frequently vs. mainstream content. So were lifestyle, health and insurance ads — including two advertisers unique to conspiracy channels that were generating leads for insurance scammers. Ads promoting questionable products were also common, such as a supplement that claimed to cure Type 2 diabetes.

• Affiliate marketing was a constant. Among those marketing low-quality products. For example, almost 95 percent used some form of affiliate marketing.

• Videos with ads got far more views. In the conspiracy channels, monetized videos had almost four times as many views as demonetized ones. Since YouTube’s business model relies on advertising, this may be because its recommender algorithm prioritizes videos that contain ads.

• Content pointed to alternative social media sites. Sites like Gab, Parler and Telegram were mentioned more commonly in conspiracy channels than in mainstream ones; Facebook and Twitter were also frequently referenced.

Informed citizens and a stronger democracy

Recent challenges to our politicalsystem have shown us the importanceof defending democracy againstmisinformation and disinformation.To that end, Tandon researchersdeveloped Ad Observatory, a free, publicresearch tool, available in English andSpanish, that made paid messagingacross Facebook and Instagram moretransparent.

They launched a new, enhanced versionof the tool — AdObservatory.org —ahead of the U.S. midterm elections,

Damon McCoy

which involved some $1.2 billion in digitalpolitical spending. The new dashboard

provides journalists and researcherswith the ability to search digital politicalad spending across Meta (formerlyFacebook) properties, see visualizationsof spending patterns, and search topicssuch as abortion, guns, and immigration.

“The lack of transparency on politicaladvertising on Meta and other digitalplatforms means that the public isvulnerable in ways that we don’t evenunderstand sufficiently,” said theC4D co-director, Associate ProfessorDamon McCoy (CSE, CCS). “With AdObservatory we’re shining some lightin corners so that researchers andjournalists can find these weak spotsand suggest ways to make onlinespaces safer.”