[liberationtech] Thu Jan 28 at Stanford -- Eric Rozier: Data Integrity Based Attacks in the New Era of Adversarial, Data Science and Engineering

[Yosem Companys]

From: David Wu <dwu4 at cs.stanford.edu>

Data Integrity Based Attacks in the New Era of Adversarial
                Data Science and Engineering

                        Eric Rozier

                 Thursday, January 28, 2016
                       Talk at 4:15pm
                         Gates 498

Abstract:

The Trustworthy Data Engineering Laboratory (TRUST Lab) has been
working with the World Bank, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the City of Cincinnati
to help solve a common problem faced by many organizations involved
in data driven investigations: companies and entities that attempt
to disguise malicious activities through attacks on the integrity
of available data.  In this talk we will explore the challenge of
assuring data integrity in heterogenous data systems that face the
challenges of velocity, variety, and volume that accompany the domain
of Big Data.  We will examine real case studies in debarrment and
corruption in international procurement with the World Bank, cases
of violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act with
the EPA, and human rights abuses of low income citizens by corporate
slum-lords in the city of Cincinnati.  In each of these cases we will
show how malicious actors manipulated the data collection and data
analytics process either through misinformation, abuse of regional
corporate legal structures, collusion with state actors, or knowledge
of underlying predictive analytics algorithms to damage the integrity
of data used by machine learning and predictive analytic processes,
or the outcomes derived from these processes, to avoid regulatory
oversite, sanctions, and investigations launched by national and
multi-national authorities.  This new type of attack is growing
increasingly common, and we will motivate and encourage increased
research on counter measures and safe guards in information systems.

We will present the work of the TRUST Lab in building new systems for
hierarchical classification of entities in common applications of
these systems and show how through the utilization of semantic and
syntactic information we can attempt to unify and detect malicious
and non-malicious violations of data integrity.  We will discuss
strategies for combatting these attacks, and methods for hardening
data collection and predictive analytics against future attacks without
resorting to methods that compromise the open and unrestricted sharing
of scientific methods and government transparency.  We will review
our work with OpenCorporates in expanding information collection and
coverage on corporate entities to build an open system for defending
against common attacks on data integrity.  Included in our talk will
be a demonstration of our new tool, CERCIS, for entity resolution
and data integrity preservation, and a discussion of both our future
work and the broader unanswered questions in this new and exciting
frontier of cyberoperations and security.

Bio:

Dr. Eric Rozier is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Computing Systems and head of the Trustworthy Data Engineering
Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Dr. Rozier has been a long time member of the IEEE, ACM, a member of
the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee, and has been named
a Frontier's of Engineering Education Faculty member by the National
Academy of Engineering, a two time Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science
for Social Good Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago, and an
IBM Research Fellow.  Dr. Rozier's research interests include secure
and dependable computing with a focus on critical infrastructures.
Before joining the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Rozier was the
founding director of the Fortinet Cybersecurity Laboratory at the
University of Miami where he worked to develop and commercialize
new technologies in homomorphic encryption for cloud-based systems.
He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
where he worked on applications in fault-tolerance and security
with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the
Information Trust Institute.