Atlantic Security Conference

The new privacy breach notification law is coming into effect shortly and information security professionals are going to be on the front lines of breach investigation. David Fraser, recognized as one of the world’s top 30 data, privacy, cybersecurity lawyers, will provide a practical overview of what these rules will require and how to protect your client’s legal interests in response to a privacy breach.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new approach of designing networks. In SDN architecture network control function is decoupled from hardware like routers and switches. This decoupled control function is executed in a logically centralized controller with a global network view. Furthermore, SDN brings network programmability. The decoupled control plane, global network view and network programmability bring efficiency and flexibility in network management and configuration. This talk will introduce Software Defined Networking. The controller is considered as a cornerstone in SDN based design. Thus, there will be a performance comparison of two important SDN controllers ONOS and OpenDaylight. Finally, the talk will provide an overview on the benefits and weaknesses of SDN based design in the context of network security.

In this presentation, Dr. Hofmann will discuss his recently completed funded research (TSAS / Public Safety Canada) into the three different types of social networks formed by lone-wolves during the 24 months prior to the commission of their first act of terrorist violence. Dr. Hofmann and his research team gathered relational data to reconstruct the ideological, signaling, and support networks of two prominent lone-wolf terrorists (Timothy McVeigh and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau) in order to explore the extent to which lone-wolves may be influenced and supported by their larger social environments, and how lone-wolves communicate their intent to plan and commit acts of terrorist violence. This study is the first in the known literature to use social network analysis to better understand the relational dynamics of lone-wolf terrorists, and adds to the growing consensus among terrorism scholars that lone-wolves do not radicalize towards violence and plan their attacks in socio-political vacuums. After discussing the methodology and findings of the study, this presentation will conclude with some preliminary policy suggestions, and how future research of a similar nature can contribute to understanding important behavioural and social aspects of lone-wolf terrorism.

Application compartmentalization (a.k.a., sandboxing) can be used to protect applications from themselves and protect users from misbehaving applications. However, the current state of the art requires applications to be willing participants: invasive modifications are required, and it's up to the application whether or not it will voluntarily sandbox itself. We would like to move towards a world in which applications can be started from within compartments (created with technologies like Capsicum) and have their access to global namespace like filesystems transparently mediated. This approach may never scale to applications with complex event models like web browsers, but we believe that there is a great deal of mileage to get out of it with more straightforward (though still sophisticated) applications like compilers.

This talk will describe recent work in FreeBSD that is driving at the goal of transparent, oblivious sandboxing. We will discuss changes in the ELF image activator and run-time linker to support transparent sandboxing as well as a support library for managing pre-opened directory descriptors and a simple shell application to start applications from within sandboxes. Together, these techniques allow us to take a few more steps towards our goal of usefully confining applications whether they like it or not.

Security vendors, InfoSec specialists, and cyber security professionals claim to use artificial intelligence
and machine learning for defending customers against the most advanced threats.
If you ask for details, however, the information provided as to how these technologies actually work can
be vague or even completely lacking. This makes you wonder “Is this real or just another marketing
myth?”
This talk will examine the mechanics of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We will:
 Explore how different techniques are being used to detect malware, malicious domains,
phishing emails, and other threats.
 Examine how these types of intelligent systems are created, trained, and implemented.
 Expose potential or inherent weaknesses within these systems.
 Closely examine how these technologies actually work and how they can potentially fail.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is a new approach of designing networks. In SDN architecture network control function is decoupled from hardware like routers and switches. This decoupled control function is executed in a logically centralized controller with a global network view. Furthermore, SDN brings network programmability. The decoupled control plane, global network view and network programmability bring efficiency and flexibility in network management and configuration. This talk will introduce Software Defined Networking. The controller is considered as a cornerstone in SDN based design. Thus, there will be a performance comparison of two important SDN controllers ONOS and OpenDaylight. Finally, the talk will provide an overview on the benefits and weaknesses of SDN based design in the context of network security.

Organizations are increasingly relying on networks for the seamless integration of distributed information systems. This has provided many advantages but it has also increased the capacity for the disruption of mission critical services. Some of these problems can be addressed by augmenting existing network management techniques while others require totally new approaches for cyber-security. This talk will discuss some of the machine learning based innovative and holistic approaches that can assist organizations in protecting the security and privacy of their data and systems.