Dr. Gene Tsudik, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine
IoT devices are increasingly popular and ubiquitous in numerous everyday settings. They sense and actuate the environment using a wide range of analog peripherals. They are often deployed in large numbers and perform critical tasks. It is no surprise that they represent attractive targets for various attacks. Recent history shows that few lessons were learned from well-known attacks and IoT devices are still commonly compromised via both known attacks and zero-day exploits. Alas, the worst is yet to come. This talk will consider several reasons for the current state of affairs in IoT (in)security and motivate research on actively secure and formally assured operation of IoT devices. This direction is both important and timely since common sense dictates that it is better to be prepared for a disaster that never comes than to be unprepared for the one that does.
Speaker's Biography: Gene Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC/ISI (1996-2000). His research interests include many topics in security, privacy, and applied cryptography. Gene Tsudik was a Fulbright Scholar and a Fulbright Specialist. He is a fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IFIP, and a foreign member of Academia Europaea. From 2009 to 2015, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of ACM TOPS. He received the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2020 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award, the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2024 NDSS Test-of-Time Award. He has no social media presence.