- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

��Vlog��ý Little Rock team takes fourth place in cyber defense competition

Ajani Oyindamola — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 16:51:39 +0000

A cyber security team from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was one of the top finishers in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Southwest regional March 17-19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Coached by Yanyan Li, an integrated computing doctoral student, the team of Connor Young, Aaron Mays, Hector Fernandez, Jeffrey Wooldridge, Josh Carlat, Malik El-Amin, Shijun Zhong, and Zachary Long took fourth place in the competition. “The regional competition is a highly intensive cyber defense competition, and requires a lot of knowledge such as networking, server management, cybersecurity, and business operation as well as teamwork and communication skills,” Li said. During the competition, each team served as the information technology department for Planet Express Trucking, Inc., a fictional company that provides freight services. The teams tasks included setting up an email server, running the company website, and developing social media policies as well as fulfilling assigned business tasks, such as adding a server to the company’s domain and writing policies about the use of external data storage devices on company property. “It was a grueling competition in which all the teams faced, in two days, challenges that real world IT teams experience over weeks or months,” said Fernandez, senior computer science major from North Little Rock. “Overall, it was a very satisfying experience in which the team as a whole practiced and developed leadership, organization, communication, and technical skills.” Team Captain Connor Young said the problems began as soon as they stepped into their workspace. “Our ‘boss’ didn’t have the passwords for the computers, so we were forced to break into them ourselves,” he said. “We had a few unexpected surprises, such as when we learned we had no internet access.” Since participants were barred from using outside devices, like their trusty smartphones, the team was left in a bind. “That means that until we fixed our network, we had to work without the luxury of Google to help solve our issues,” Young said. Competitors also had to defend their work against the Red Team, whose members consist of professional penetration testers charged with sabotaging their work. Penetration testers are hackers hired by companies to find holes in their cybersecurity systems. Red Team members employed both technical and psychological attacks. “One of the more ridiculous and effective attacks was that they would go outside our rooms, type on a computer while maliciously staring into the room, and laugh as the teams ruined their computers trying to stop the Red Team’s attack,” Young said. “Several teams ended up letting the Red Team in during their rushed attempt to keep them out, but we responded by simply waving at them and continuing on with our work.” The Red Team did pull one over on the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock squad by tricking the competition hosts into having the Red Team temporarily serve as a judge, which gave it full access to the team’s workspace. “These are known as social engineering attacks, and they exist to remind us that the weakest part of a computer’s security is the person using it,” Young said. The ��Vlog��ý Little Rock team was one of eight to advance to the regional event after competing against 20 teams from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico during a virtual qualifying round on Feb. 18.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock student creates virtual tour guide using facial recognition research

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 15:31:33 +0000

A virtual tour owl has come to life thanks to the research of a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Connor Young, a first-year integrated computing doctoral student from Springdale, is using his research in facial recognition to create “WhoNu,” a virtual owl tour guide that will welcome guests at the‘s open house next week. Young is a research assistant at the center. “What my program does is automatically detect facial movements and key facial features and transmits them into points that we can move to a virtual avatar,” Young said. “It is based on my previous research. We call it the puppet program.” His research involved facial-based emotion recognition and tracking, where a person is looking on a computer screen. He did that research as a 2014 and 2015 participant in ��Vlog��ý Little Rock’s Summer Undergraduate Program of Entrepreneurship and Research. In 2016, he and a team of students developed an eye-tracking system for trucking companies as part of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Teams (I-Corps) Program. The system helps detect fatigue and sleep in truck drivers. WhoNu will greet visitors during the from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 7-8, where visitors can see the latest cutting-edge technology in the world of virtual and augmented reality. WhoNu is an interdisciplinary project integrating virtual reality, theatre, and graphic art. While Young created WhoNu’s programming, Lead Artist Jay Zak and Zaire Husband, an undergraduate student researcher in the center, designed WhoNu. Through WhoNu, a group of students from the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance will interact with visitors waiting to go on a tour. Young’s programming will allow WhoNu to analyze the students’ language and facial expressions and repeat it to the guests, as the students observe visitors through webcams. The open house is an opportunity for people to provide feedback that Young hopes will improve WhoNu. “One of the problems with working with technology is that you often get feedback only from other people working in the technology industry,” he said. “Being able to collect real data from regular people will be invaluable in determining how WhoNu performs.”

��Vlog��ýLR cybersecurity students research methods to keep digital voting safe from hacking

Ajani Oyindamola — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 16:38:52 +0000

Three students from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock participated in an international cybersecurity challenge to come up with a strategy to keep digital voting safe from hackers. ��Vlog��ýLR team members included Connor Young, a first-year integrated computing doctoral student from Springdale, Arkansas, Hector Fernandez, a senior majoring in computer science from North Little Rock, and Yanyan Li, a fourth-year integrated computing doctoral student from China. Nineteen teams from business schools around the world competed in the Kaspersky Lab Cybersecurity Case Study Competition, hosted by The Economist’s website in December 2016. Kaspersky Lab is a global cybersecurity company founded in 1997 whose security solutions and services protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. Recognizing that digital voting is likely the next frontier in democracy, the competition challenged teams to guarantee the anonymity of online voters, while preventing voter fraud, voting under duress, the release of early results, and allowing people to verify the results of the election. “The competition was very interesting and I was very impressed with the submissions,” said Eugene Kaspersky, chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab. “The challenges of cybersecurity mean the next generation of experts face a changing frontier – there will be plenty of things to work on and securing digital voting systems for national elections is just one example.” “If cybercriminals exploited one small vulnerability, it could potentially change the course of a nation’s history, and these young scholars are bringing us one step closer to making secure digital voting a reality,” Kaspersky said. The teams competed for a $10,000 top prize. New York University, which proposed a “permissioned blockchain” configuration, was declared the winner. A central authority admits voting machines to the network before the start of the election, followed by voting machines acting autonomously to build a public, distributed ledger of votes. In addition to addressing threats to the integrity of the system, the plan allows voters to tell if their individual vote was counted.

��Vlog��ýLR’s plan to protect digital voting

��Vlog��ýLR’s plan to secure digital voting relied on three main components: a voter application, a registration server, and voting servers. First, voters log on to the voting app and provide voter identification, which is verified by the registration server. The registration server then provides the voter with a ballot. Voters are further protected with the use of an additional password. “In our designed system, each vote is signed with a voter’s address, the ballot it is associated with, and the registration server address,” Li said. “If somebody wants to fake another’s vote, our system will find out because the signature will be different. It is like using private/public key encryption, where we assume the private key is always kept secret and is only known to the user himself.” Votes are sent to the voting server, which updates information using blockchain technology, which allows information to be distributed to multiple databases. This allows the information to be protected from data breaches at a single location. To prevent election results from being released early, the team would divide the decryption key into pieces and distribute them to political candidates. Only when all pieces of the decryption key are united would the results be revealed. “At the end of the election, each candidate turns in his or her piece of the key, the key is reassembled, and the votes can be decrypted,” Fernandez said. “It is only at that point that the winner can be known. And because the decryption key is then shared with all the ledger holders, anybody who holds a ledger can verify independently the vote totals.” In the end, the election results can be verified by anyone. “All votes can be publicly visible without revealing voter identity, meaning that anybody could count the votes to determine who won and verify the legitimacy of the election,” Young said. Other participating universities included California State Polytechnic University, Champlain College Online, City University of New York, DePaul University, Drexel University, Edinburgh Napier University, Florida Institute of Technology, George Mason University, Maryland Cybersecurity Center, New York University, Newcastle University, Northeastern University, Plymouth University, Rutgers Graduate School, Saint Peter’s University, University College London, University of Maryland, and Queen’s University Belfast. To view the ��Vlog��ýLR team’s competition video, visit. In the upper right photo, ��Vlog��ýLR cybersecurity team members, from left to right, included Yanyan Li, Connor Young, and Hector Fernandez.

��Vlog��ýLR student researches privacy awareness on social media

Ajani Oyindamola — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 14:55:18 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock doctoral student is out to discover how knowledgeable people are about their privacy on social media. Terry Williams, a doctoral student in the integrated computing program, is using a series of surveys and privacy awareness tips to investigate privacy awareness and social media in her dissertation, “A Study of Privacy Awareness in the Digital Age and the Influence of Knowledge Over Time.” Williams became interested in studying privacy when she began encountering targeted advertising, tracking technology that lets companies target online advertisements based on consumers’ previous Internet activities. “A couple of years ago, I thought I needed some black boots, so I go to Zappos,” she said. “Later on, I was on some news site, and there are ads about little black boots. I thought it was creepy that they are following me online. It didn’t stop me from shopping online, but all the bazillion bits of information about me are out there.” Many people are protective of personal information like phone numbers, addresses, credit cards, and Social Security numbers. However, companies track everything that people do on the internet, from web searches and online shopping to “likes” on Facebook and retweets on Twitter.

Terry Williams

“It’s really much bigger than that,” Williams said. “It’s not just your identifying information, it’s about everything you do on the internet. The vast majority of people don’t even understand how much information companies have on them.” Dr. Nitin Agarwal, the ��Vlog��ýLR Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy endowed chair and a professor of information science and Williams’ dissertation adviser, said internet users easily find themselves at risk of oversharing information. “It is unreasonable to expect social media companies to intervene and reverse the information-sharing behaviors,” Agarwal said. “But as information privacy researchers and policy makers, we owe it to ourselves that we educate others and spread awareness about these risks. Terry’s research is a step forward in this direction. The research will inform privacy awareness education and training programs, policy and decision making, and general awareness about information sharing.” Williams earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and an MBA from the University of Memphis. She has spent her career working in a variety of information technology leadership roles, including more than a decade as the information technology manager at the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory. After becoming an adjunct instructor for ITT Technical Institute in 2001, Williams discovered a love of teaching and pursued her doctorate at ��Vlog��ýLR to become a university professor. For more information on the study or to participate, visit.

- University News Archive - ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

����Vlog��ý Little Rock team takes fourth place in cyber defense competition

����Vlog��ý Little Rock student creates virtual tour guide using facial recognition research

����Vlog��ýLR cybersecurity students research methods to keep digital voting safe from hacking

����Vlog��ýLR student researches privacy awareness on social media

- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

��Vlog��ý Little Rock team takes fourth place in cyber defense competition

��Vlog��ý Little Rock student creates virtual tour guide using facial recognition research

��Vlog��ýLR cybersecurity students research methods to keep digital voting safe from hacking

��Vlog��ýLR student researches privacy awareness on social media