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Cyber Security Webinar by Roland Kromes MSc - Modeling a low-power IoT architecture for Blockchain and Smart Contract applications

Cyber Security Webinar by Roland Kromes MSc - Modeling a low-power IoT architecture for Blockchain and Smart Contract applications 23 November 2021 12:00 till 12:45 - Location: Zoom meeting Join Zoom Meeting https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/93459336716?pwd=VFk4N3dCQTF2TUlHYnBLejk0dFVPUT09 Meeting ID: 934 5933 6716 Passcode: 389654 Abstract Nowadays, most IoT applications are based on a centralized system in which all of the system participants have to rely on a central entity. In such a system, data immutability, data traceability, and transparency cannot be provided. Blockchain technology is an entirely decentralized system in which the third trusted party (central entity) is removed. Contrarily to centralized systems, blockchain technology provides data immutability, traceability, and transparency. Most modern blockchains also allow the deployment of smart contracts, which are digital programs that can be read by all participants and executed automatically according to an event on the blockchain. These advantageous features of blockchain technology show a clear interest in the integration of IoT with blockchain technology. The contribution's main objectives are the study of the integration possibilities of IoT with blockchain technology and the development of a model of dedicated low-power-consumption IoT hardware architecture that enables communication with multiple types of blockchain. The proposed blockchain APIs (Ethereum, Hyperledger Sawtooth) are written in C++. These APIs can create valid transactions. The IoT architecture model's CPU is emulated with QEMU and the dedicated cryptographic hardware accelerators are modeled in SystemC-TLM high-level hardware description language. As QEMU and SystemC-TLM work on different time environments, they must be synchronized by a co-simulation platform. The CPU of the proposed IoT architecture executes a Linux Operating System, which runs blockchain APIs. These APIs cannot have direct access to the hardware accelerators. In order to handle access to the hardware accelerators and the orchestration of dedicated power management, Linux Kernel device drivers were developed. The results represent that a significant reduction of the overall energy consumption can be achieved when the elliptic curve point multiplication and hash operations are hardware accelerated. Bio I am Roland Kromes, a PhD candidate at the Université Côte d'Azur in the Electronics, Antennas and Telecommunications Laboratory (LEAT-CNRS). In January, I will join the Cybersecurity group at Delft University of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher. I obtained my diploma in Electronics, Systems and Telecommunications with the specialty of embedded systems at the Université Côte d'Azur. My thesis focuses on the possibilities of IoT integration with Blockchain technology and the modeling of a specific low power IoT architecture for Blockchain and Smart Contract applications. This thesis is part of the Smart IoT for Mobility multidisciplinary project (ANR-National Agency for Research) in which I could also work on acceptability issues of Blockchain technology with fellow management researchers. My research interests: Blockchain, IoT, applied cryptography, secure data sharing.

Cyber Security Webinar by Dr. Yunpeng Li - Uncertainty quantification and propagation in high-dimensional spaces

Cyber Security Webinar by Dr. Yunpeng Li - Uncertainty quantification and propagation in high-dimensional spaces 28 September 2021 12:00 till 12:45 - Location: Zoom meeting Join Zoom Meeting https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/99314357068 Meeting ID: 993 1435 7068 Passcode: 678062 Abstract: Deep learning models, which are cornerstones in the success of modern machine learning applications, often lack representation of uncertainty or produce overconfident predictions that can lead to costly consequences. The optimal transport theory has found it application in quantifying uncertainty in large-scale machine learning problems by measuring the Wasserstein distance between data distributions. Separately, for real-world sequential inference applications, differentiable filters provided a mathematically principled framework to propagate model uncertainty. This talk will hence be divided into two parts. In the first part, I will discuss a new family of slice-based Wasserstein distance metrics, called augmented sliced Wasserstein distances (ASWDs), with a novel incorporation of injective neural networks. ASWDs learns nonlinear projections that can capture the complex structure of the data distributions which improve their projection efficiency. In the second part, I will discuss our recent efforts in constructing more expressive dynamic model and proposal distributions in the differentiable particle filtering framework through normalizing flow. In addition, I will introduce an end-to-end learning objective based upon the maximisation of a pseudo-likelihood function which can improve the estimation of states when large portion of groundtruth information are unknown. Bio: Dr Yunpeng Li is Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey in the UK. Before joining Surrey as a Lecturer in AI in 2018, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College at Oxford. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the McGill University in Canada in 2017. His research interests are in the areas of statistical machine learning and signal processing, particularly Bayesian inference techniques and the optimal transport theory. He has broad interests in applications of machine learning, e.g. breast cancer detection, dental disease detection, and environment acoustic sensing. His work has won the best paper award in the NeurlPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Developing World in 2018 and 2019.

Cyber Security Webinar by Martin Fejrskov MSc - Using NetFlow to measure the impact of deploying DNS-based blacklists

Cyber Security Webinar by Martin Fejrskov MSc - Using NetFlow to measure the impact of deploying DNS-based blacklists 12 October 2021 12:00 till 12:45 - Location: Zoom meeting Join Zoom Meeting https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/95465881342 Meeting ID: 954 6588 1342 Passcode: 808322 Abstract To prevent user exposure to a wide range of cyber security threats, organizations and companies often resort to deploying blacklists in DNS resolvers or DNS firewalls. The impact of such a deployment is often measured by comparing the coverage of individual blacklists, by counting the number of blocked DNS requests, or by counting the number of flows redirected to a benign web page that contains a warning to the user. This paper suggests an alternative to this by using NetFlow data to measure the effect of a DNS-based blacklist deployment. Our findings suggest that only 38-40\% of blacklisted flows are web traffic. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the flows blacklisted by IP address, and it is shown that the majority of these are potentially benign, such as flows towards a web server hosting both benign and malicious sites. Finally, the flows blacklisted by domain name are categorized as either spam or malware, and it is shown that less than 6\% are considered malicious. Short bio: Martin Fejrskov is an Industrial Ph.D. student at Telenor Denmark and Aalborg University focusing on detecting cybersecurity threats with data from Internet Service Providers. Prior to the Ph.D. studies, he was a Solution Architect at Telenor Denmark, focusing on security services and the national backbone network. Before that he was a Product Manager at the Danish company formerly known as ETI A/S, heading the development and architecture of one of the core products. He received his Master of Science from Aalborg University in 2005 with excellent grades, studying primarily within the fields of network protocols, traffic analysis and security.

Cyber Security Webinar by Dr. Shihui Fu of the University of Waterloo - Transparent Succinct Zero-Knowledge Arguments for R1CS with Efficient Verifier

Cyber Security Webinar by Dr. Shihui Fu of the University of Waterloo - Transparent Succinct Zero-Knowledge Arguments for R1CS with Efficient Verifier 09 November 2021 12:00 till 12:45 - Location: Zoom meeting Join Zoom Meeting https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/95108026354?pwd=RVhXS3EwQjIyZnVzNk1ScWNzQmtTdz09 Meeting ID: 951 0802 6354 Passcode: 378365 Abstract We propose Polaris, a zkSNARK with quasi-linear prover time and both polylogarithmic proof size and verification time in the size of the arithmetic circuit representing the statement. By instantiating with different commitment schemes, we obtain several zkSNARKs where the verifier's costs and the proof size range from $O(\log^2{N})$ to $O(\sqrt{N})$ depending on the underlying polynomial commitment schemes. All these schemes do not require a trusted setup. It is plausibly post-quantum secure when instantiated with a secure collision-resistant hash function. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that Polaris offers a much lower verification time than Ligero and Aurora for instances with large sizes as we reduce the complexity from linear to polylogarithmic. Short bio Shihui Fu received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CAS in 2018. Currently, he is a post-doc in University of Waterloo. His main research interests include cryptographic protocols and zero-knowledge proof.

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Students Amos Yusuf, Mick Dam & Bas Brouwer winners of Mekel Prize 2024

Master students Amos Yusuf, from the ME faculty (Mick Dam, from the EEMCS faculty and graduate Bas Brouwer have won the Mekel Prize 2024 for the best extra scientific activity at TU Delft: the development of an initiative that brings master students into the classroom teaching sciences to the younger generations. The prize was ceremonially awarded by prof Tim van den Hagen on 13 November after the Van Hasselt Lecture at the Prinsenhof, Delft. They received a statue of Professor Jan Mekel and 1.500,- to spend on their project. Insights into climate change are being openly doubted. Funding for important educational efforts and research are being withdrawn. Short clips – so called “reels” – on Youtube and TikTok threaten to simplify complex political and social problems. AI fakes befuddle what is true and what is not. The voices of science that contribute to those discussion with modesty, careful argument and scepticism, are drowned in noise. This poses a threat for universities like TU Delft, who strive to increase student numbers, who benefit from diverse student populations and aim to pass on their knowledge and scientific virtues to the next generation. It is, therefore, alarming that student enrolments to Bachelor and Master Programs at TU Delft have declined in the past year. Students in front of the class The project is aimed to make the sciences more appealing to the next generation. They have identified the problem that students tend miss out on the opportunity of entering a higher education trajectory in the Beta sciences – because they have a wrong picture of such education. In their mind, they depict it as boring and dry. In his pilot lecture at the Stanislas VMBO in Delft, Amos Yusuf has successfully challenged this image. He shared his enthusiasm for the field of robotics and presented himself as a positive role model to the pupils. And in return the excitement of the high school students is palpable in the videos and pictures from the day. The spark of science fills their eyes. Bas Brouwer Mick Dam are the founders of NUVO – the platform that facilitates the engagement of Master Students in high school education in Delft Their efforts offer TU Delft Master Students a valuable learning moment: By sharing insights from their fields with pupils at high school in an educational setting, our students can find identify their own misunderstandings of their subject, learn to speak in front of non-scientific audiences and peak into education as a work field they themselves might not have considered. An extraordinary commitment According to the Mekel jury, the project scored well on all the criteria (risk mitigation, inclusiveness, transparency and societal relevance). However, it was the extraordinary commitment of Amos who was fully immersed during his Master Project and the efforts of Brouwer and Dam that brought together teaching and research which is integral to academic culture that made the project stand out. About the Mekel Prize The Mekel Prize will be awarded to the most socially responsible research project or extra-scientific activity (e.g. founding of an NGO or organization, an initiative or realization of an event or other impactful project) by an employee or group of employees of TU Delft – projects that showcase in an outstanding fashion that they have been committed from the beginning to relevant moral and societal values and have been aware of and tried to mitigate as much as possible in innovative ways the risks involved in their research. The award recognizes such efforts and wants to encourage the responsible development of science and technology at TU Delft in the future. For furthermore information About the project: https://www.de-nuvo.nl/video-robotica-pilot/ About the Mekel Prize: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/tpm/our-faculty/departments/values-technology-and-innovation/sections/ethics-philosophy-of-technology/mekel-prize

New catheter technology promises safer and more efficient treatment of blood vessels

Each year, more than 200 million catheters are used worldwide to treat vascular diseases, including heart disease and artery stenosis. When navigating into blood vessels, friction between the catheter and the vessel wall can cause major complications. With a new innovative catheter technology, Mostafa Atalla and colleagues can change the friction from having grip to completely slippery with the flick of a switch. Their design improves the safety and efficiency of endovascular procedures. The findings have been published in IEEE. Catheter with variable friction The prototype of the new catheter features advanced friction control modules to precisely control the friction between the catheter and the vessel wall. The friction is modulated via ultrasonic vibrations, which overpressure the thin fluid layer. This innovative variable friction technology makes it possible to switch between low friction for smooth navigation through the vessel and high friction for optimal stability during the procedure. In a proof-of-concept, Atalla and his team show that the prototype significantly reduces friction, averaging 60% on rigid surfaces and 11% on soft surfaces. Experiments on animal aortic tissue confirm the promising results of this technology and its potential for medical applications. Fully assembled catheters The researchers tested the prototype during friction experiments on different tissue types. They are also investigating how the technology can be applied to other procedures, such as bowel interventions. More information Publicatie DOI : 10.1109/TMRB.2024.3464672 Toward Variable-Friction Catheters Using Ultrasonic Lubrication | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore Mostafa Atalla: m.a.a.atalla@tudelft.nl Aimee Sakes: a.sakes@tudelft.nl Michaël Wiertlewski: m.wiertlewski@tudelft.nl Would you like to know more and/or attend a demonstration of the prototype please contact me: Fien Bosman, press officer Health TU Delft: f.j.bosman@tudelft.nl/ 0624953733

A key solution to grid congestion

On behalf of the TU Delft PowerWeb Institute, researchers Kenneth Brunninx and Simon Tindemans are handing over a Position Paper to the Dutch Parliament on 14 November 2024, with a possible solution to the major grid capacity problems that are increasingly cropping up in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is unlikely to meet the 2030 climate targets, and one of the reasons for this is that large industry cannot switch to electricity fast enough, partly because of increasingly frequent problems around grid capacity and grid congestion. In all likelihood, those problems will actually increase this decade before they can decrease, the researchers argue. The solution offered by the TU Delft PowerWeb Institute researchers is the ‘flexible backstop’. With a flexible backstop, the current capacity of the power grid can be used more efficiently without sacrificing safety or reliability. A flexible backstop is a safety mechanism that automatically and quickly reduces the amount of electricity that an electric unit can draw from the grid (an electric charging station or a heat pump) or deliver (a PV installation). It is a small device connected or built into an electrical unit, such as a charging station or heat pump, that ‘communicates’ with the distribution network operator. In case of extreme stress on the network, the network operator sends a signal to the device to limit the amount of power. Germany recently introduced a similar system with electric charging stations. The backstop would be activated only in periods of acute congestion problems and could help prevent the last resort measure, which is cutting off electricity to users. ‘Upgrading the electricity network remains essential, but in practice it will take years. So there is a need for short-term solutions that can be integrated into long-term planning. We, the members of the TU Delft PowerWeb Institute, call on the government, network operators and regulator to explore the flexible backstop as an additional grid security measure,’ they said. The entire Paper can be read here . Kenneth Brunninx Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Governance and Management, where he uses quantitative models to evaluate energy policy and market design with the aim of reducing CO2 emissions. Simon Tindemans is Associate Professor in the Intelligent Electrical Power Grids group at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. His research interests include uncertainty and risk management for power grids. TU Delft PowerWeb Institute is a community of researchers who are investigating how to make renewable energy systems reliable, future proof and accessible to everyone.