News archive – Secure Systems Group

2023:

September 7: Professor N. Asokan has been named a 2023 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the highest national honour a researcher in the arts and humanities, social sciences and sciences can achieve, for his outstanding scientific achievements.
June 29: Thank you for attending the Secure Systems Demo Day 2023! If you are interested in the event’s history, please read the blog post: In a decade, SSG Demo Day has become a “must” for security experts.
June 22: Four doctoral defenses coming in August:
June 19: The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) invites applications for Postdoctoral Fellows and Research Fellows. HIIT offers a HIIT Postdoctoral Fellow position up to three years. For more senior candidates, HIIT offers a HIIT Research Fellow position up to five years. The length of the contract as well as the starting and ending dates are negotiable. All excellent researchers in any area of ICT can be considered, but priority is given to candidates who support one (or more) of the HIIT strategic focus areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Health, Cybersecurity, Data Science, or Foundations of Computing. The deadline for applications is August 13th, 2023 at 11:59 PM (23:59 UTC+03:00).
June 1: One week to go… List of presentations and attending companies can be found from the Demo Day 2023 webpage.
May 5: Mikko Kiviharju, Professor of Practice in security, joined the Secure Systems research group. Read more about Mikko’s research interests.
April 14: SSG alumni, Professor Jian Liu from Zhejiang University has won the 2022 Olympus Pioneer Award with his CCS ’15 paper Secure Deduplication of Encrypted Data without Additional Independent Servers. Read the news on Huawei announced 2022 OlympusMons Awards winners – Huawei Central.
February 21: Save the date: Secure Systems Demo Day 2023 will be organized on June 8!

2022:

December 9: HAIC scholarships available for top applicants for Security Master’s programmes, read more here.
December 8: The Department of Computer Science at Aalto University invites applications for tenure-track positions at the assistant professor level. Women and others underrepresented in computer science are especially encouraged to apply. The call is open until January 15, 2023. For more information and the application form visit click here.
December 7: Congratulations to our doctoral researcher Sebastian Szyller who received a Nokia Foundation’s Nokia scholarship for his “Ownership and Confidentiality in Machine Learning Systems” research topic!
December 1: Application period for security and cloud computing international Master’s programmes is open!
November 4: Application periods for security and cloud computing international Master’s programmes open soon!
October 28: Russell Lai started as an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science in July 2022.
September 8: Open position for a Professor of Practice in Cyber Security at our department!!!
July 14: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) is seeking to fulfil Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Fellow Positions in artificial intelligence, computational health, cybersecurity, data science and foundations of computing.
July 12: M.Sc. (Tech) Buse Atli will defend her doctoral dissertation “Securing Machine Learning: Streamlining Attacks and Defenses Under Realistic Adversary Models” on August 12. Opponent Professor Simin Nadjm-Tehrani, Linköping University, Sweden, Custos: Professor N Asokan, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science.
July 6: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) summer call for fully-funded doctoral student positions is open until August 21, 2022.
July 5: Our new book “Hardware Platform Security for Mobile Devices” by Lachlan J. Gunn, N. Asokan, Jan-Erik Ekberg, Hans Liljestrand, Vijayanand Nayani, and Thomas Nyman is published in Now’s Foundations and Trends in Privacy and Security series. A preprint is available here.
May 22: Happening in two days, Secure Systems Demo Day 2022. You can look at the posters already on the event page!
March 22: Registration to Secure Systems Demo Day 2022 is open!
March 16: Secure Systems Demo Day 2022 will be organized on May 24 in the CS building at Aalto University. More information coming soon!
January 10: Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) is seeking to fulfil Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Fellow Positions in artificial intelligence, computational health, cybersecurity, data science and foundations of computing. Deadline for applications is January 30.

2021

December 17: The Department of Computes Science is now looking for Summer employees, application deadline 17 January 2022.
December 14: Looking for a project or thesis topic? There are several research topics available for security students, click here to learn more.
November 26: MSc Arseny Kurnikov will defend his doctoral dissertation “Trusted Execution Environments in Cloud Computing” on December 21. Opponent: Associate Professor Mika Ylianttila, University of Oulu, Finland. Custos: Professor N Asokan, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science.
August 24: Doctoral candidate Tommi Gröndahl tells about his dissertation on language technology methods in an Aalto News arcticle.
August 9: FM Tommi Gröndahl will defend his doctoral dissertation “Natural Language Processing in Adversarial Settings and Beyond: Benefits and Risks of Text Classification, Transformation, and Representation” on August 23.Opponent: professor Jörg Tiedemann, University of Helsinki, Finland; Custos: professor N. Asokan, University of Waterloo / Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science. The defence will be organised via remote technology.
June 13: Our annual event Secure Systems Demo Day to showcase the current research in information security opens on Tueday, June 15, at 15 with Janne Lindqvist’s opening talk. In the poster session we will have 22 presentations, 2 “coffee rooms” for discussions and 2 company desks. The event will end with informal get-together. Registration is open until the end of the event. Welcome!
May 22: Registration to Secure Systems Demo Day 2021 is open!
May 12: Save the Date! Secure Systems Demo Day will be held virtually on Tue, June 15, afternoon. More information coming soon.
April 1: MSc (Tech) Thanh Bui will defend his doctoral dissertation “Security Failurres in Modern Software” on April 27! Opponent: Professor Robert Lagerström, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Custos: Professor Tuomas Aura, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science. The defence will be organised via remote technology.
February 1: The Dean of the School of Science have appointed Lachlan Gunn as University Lecturer. Congratulations Lachlan!

2020

December 18: The Department of Computer Sciences is looking for summer employees. Apply before Jan 17.
December 17: The HICT Spring call 2021 is open with almost 40 doctoral student positions in computer science, including security. DL February 2.
November 19: The IEEE Computer Society Publications Board has awarded the 2019 Best Paper Award to SSG alumni Jian Liu’s “Scalable Byzantine Consensus via Hardware-Assisted Secret Sharing,” paper published on IEEE Transactions on Computers. The paper presents FastBFT, a fast consensus algorithm that can be used by blockchains. Congratulations to Jian Liu and Asokan!
November 1: MSc Thomas Nyman will defend his doctoral dissertation “Toward Hardware-assisted Run-time Protection” on November 10. Opponent: Professor Mathias Payer, EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences, Switzerland. Custos: Professor N. Asokan, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science. The defence will be organised via remote access.October 24: Demo Day program and the list of presentations are up on the event page.
October 1: Registration for Secure Systems Demo Day 2020 is open!
September 23: Secure Systems Demo Day 2020 will be held virtually on October 29!
September 11: There are plenty of research topics available for students, please check: https://ssg.aalto.fi/research/available-research-topics/
September 10: SECCLO – Master’s programme in security and cloud computing at Aalto continues with four more intake. Read more from Aalto News article.
June 23: Our paper Effective writing style transfer via combinatorial paraphrasing has been accepted to Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS2020). arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13464
March 13: Secure Systems Demo Day 2020 will be postponed to autumn given the university level decision to stop all events until end of May.
February 17: Secure Systems Demo Day 2020 website and registration is open, welcome and see you on April 16!
February 1: Save the date: Secure Systems Demo Day 2020 will be on April 16. More information with link to registration coming soon.
January 25: Prof. N. Asokan gave a talk “Security, Privacy, and Machine Learning (pdf) at School of Engineering and Technology, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok.
January 22: Prof. Janne Lindqvist from Rutgers University has joined our research group! You can read more on Janne’s background and future plans from Aalto News and about the Mozilla research grant he won for a project in which researchers aim to understand user experience of people who stream videos online. Janne will speak more about his research at the Installation Talks event on 29 January. The installation talk event is open to all, welcome!
January 17: MSc Hans Liljestrand will defend his doctoral dissertation “Hardware-assisted memory safety” on Monday 20 January.

2019

December 18: Our work on Extraction of Complex DNN Models: Real Threat or Boogeyman? will be presented on February 7, at The AAAI Workshop on Engineering Dependable and Secure Machine Learning Systems, in New York, USA. [Presentation Slides]
December 16: Department of Computer Science is looking for summer workers. The online application form closes 19 January 2020.
November 14: Department of Computer Science at the School of Science of Aalto University has an open call for Assistant Professors in Computer Science. Applications in all areas of Computer Science are welcomed, with the following areas highlighted: Algorithm Engineering, Data Management, Software Engineering, Software Systems. The deadline for applications is January 12, 2020 .
November 13: Prof. N. Asokan will give a keynote “Hardware-assisted Trusted Execution Environments: Look Back, Look Ahead” on November 14 at the ACM CCS 2019 in London, and on November 16 at the 2019 Westlake International Forum, Hangzhou.
October 27: Hans Liljestrand presented Protecting the stack with PACed canaries paper at the 4th Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX 2019) in Huntsville, Ontario, Canada.
October 2: Lachlan Gunn presents his Making Speculative BFT Resilient with Trusted Monotonic Counters paper today at the 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2019) in Lyon, France.
September 4: Saara Matala, Doctor of Technology and historian, who wrote the historical insight into the development of mobile trusted execution environments (TEEs) in Nokia smartphones 15+ years ago, believes that the better grasp people have of social matters, the better decisions they make. ’My personal mission is to spread the word that a well-rounded understanding of society makes for better engineers better equipped to solve the elaborate problems ahead.’ Read more of Saara’s thoughts from Aalto News.
August 14: Hans Liljestrand will present “PAC it up: Towards Pointer Integrity using ARM Pointer Authentication” paper today at USENIX Security ’19.
August 2: Mika Juuti, M.Sc. (Tech.), will defend the dissertation “Access Control and Machine Learning: Evasion and Defenses” at the Aalto University School of Science on August 19. In this dissertation, machine learning-reliant access control systems were examined.
July 16: Lachlan Gunn presents his “Circumventing Cryptographic Deniability with Remote Attestation” paper today at the 19th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2019) in Stockholm, Sweden.
June 26: Our new blog post gives historical insight into the development of mobile trusted execution environments (TEEs) in Nokia smartphones 15+ years ago.
June 19: Mika Juuti will present his PRADA: Protecting Against DNN Model Stealing Attacks paper today at the 4th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Stockholm, Sweden.
June 13: In our new blog post we show several ways that pointer authentication can be used to improve security, and prevent attackers from turning programmer errors into remote-code-execution vulnerabilities.
June 6: Hans Liljestrand presented his PACStack (https://PACStack.github.io) poster and Thomas Nyman his HardScope (https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10295 ) paper at DAC 2019.
May 24: Already 100+ registrations from Aalto, University of Helsinki and local infosec companies to our annual Demo Day 2019! Registration is still open, please register if you yet haven’t.
May 9: AuDI: Towards Autonomous IoT Device-Type Identification using Periodic Communication by Samuel Marchal, Markus Miettinen, Thien Duc Nguyen, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi and N. Asokan, is published in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Networking and Communications, 2019.
May 3: DIoT: A Federated Self-learning Anomaly Detection System for IoT by Thien Duc Nguyen, Samuel Marchal, Markus Miettinen, Hossein Fereidooni, N. Asokan, and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, has been accepted to appear in the 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2019), 2019. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.07474
April 30: Demo Day 2019 update: List of presentations can be found from the event site.
April 18: “Authenticated Call Stack” paper by Liljestrand et al. was accepted for LBR poster at DAC 2019.
March 29: Our paper PRADA: Protecting against DNN Model Stealing Attacks got accepted to EuroS&P’19 – conference.
March 11: Registration to our annual Demo Day is open!
March 6: Watch “The Undeniable Truth” talk given by Prof. N. Asokan and Dr. Lachlan Gunn at Black Hat EU 2018 showing how remote attestation can be used to circumvent deniability guarantees in secure messaging protocols like Signal or WhatsApp. Paper to appear at #PETS 2019 (preprint at https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/424).
February 19: Department of Computer Science has an open call for 3-4 Professors of Practice in several area including one position reserved for security. The requirements include doctoral degree and industrial experience. These positions are particularly suitable for researchers who want to move flexibly between industry and academia. The deadline for applications is 13 March.
January 11: Department of Computer Science is looking for summer workers. The online application form closes 31 January 2019.

2018

December 17: CS Department is hiring new professors, DL January 10!
December 10: Demo Day 2019 will be held on May 29, 2019!
December 5: ACM has named Prof. N. Asokan ACM Fellow for his contributions to systems security and privacy, especially of mobile systems. Congratulations! Read more from Aalto News.
November 12: Hans Liljestrand’s master’s thesis Linux Kernel Memory Safety has been selected as the best information security master’s thesis in Finland! Congratulations! Read more at Tietoturva, University of Helsinki.
November 8: Aalto University and the University of Helsinki are looking for Postdoctoral Researchers and Research Fellows in ICT! Deadline November 29. Read more from HIIT website.
October 18: Prof. N. Asokan received the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award for his pioneering research on fair-exchange protocols, trusted device pairing and mobile trusted execution environments that has had widespread impact and led to large-scale deployment. Congratulations! Read more on ICRI-CARS website.
September 14: Congratulations to a new Doctor of Science in Technology! Elena Reshetova, M.Sc., defended her dissertation “Mobile and embedded platform security“ today at the Aalto University School of Science.
August 2o: Open positions available in our group for postdoctoral researchers. If you want to do systems security research, click for more information.
June 27: Doctoral candidate MSc. Elena Reshetova’s dissertation “Mobile and embedded platform security” was approved by the pre-examiners and the public examination of the dissertation will take place on 14 September 2018 at Aalto University.
June 20: Our annual Demo Day was a big success with 140+ participants! Big thanks to all students, academia and company people for coming and for your interest towards our research!
June 18: Congratulations to a new Doctor of Science in Technology! Jian Liu, M.Sc., defended his dissertation “Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Assisted Services“ on 18 June 2018 at 12 noon at the Aalto University School of Science.
June 13: Already 130+ registrations to our Demo Day next week Wednesday, June 20! Registration is open until June 20, but we hope you register asap if you are planning to come. Check for program on the Demo Day 2018 event page!
June 4: Honorable mention to SSG Alumna Klaudia Krawiecka’s Master’s thesis “Improving Web Security Using Trusted Hardware” by the Finnish society for Computer Science at the Annual Symposium of Computer Science on June 4 in Turku, Finland. Klaudia’s work introduced SafeKeeper, a system that is designed to address the challenge of protecting user’s passwords and other types of sensitive data in web servers. Klaudia received also SCI Master’s Thesis Award 2017 (1000 €) granted by the Dean of School of Science, Aalto University.
May 28: Jian Liu, M.Sc., will defend his dissertation “Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Assisted Services“ on 18 June 2018 at 12 noon at the Aalto University School of Science. Opponent: Professor Dr. Moti Yung, Columbia University, United States. Custos: Professor N.Asokan, Aalto University, School of Science, Department of Computer Science.
May 23: SafeKeeper has been noticed and summarized by The Morning Paper. Read more about SafeKeeper on our blog or on our SafeKeeper page
May 3: Upcoming HAIC Talk on June 19 by Prof. Moti Yung (Snap and Columbia University) on “The Advertisement Exchange: How to Develop Agile Cryptographic Support for an Evolving Ecosystem“. HAIC Talks are open to everyone and free of change. However, we encourage you to register.
April 30: Dr. Andrew Paverd has been selected as one of two recipients of the 2017-18 US-UK Fulbright Cyber Security Scholar Award. He will be visiting Prof. Gene Tsudik at the University of California, Irvine from May – August 2018.
March 21: Demo Day 2018 update: keynote lecture “Science of Security—Theory vs. Measuring the Observable World” by Paul Van Oorschot, Professor of Computer Science (Carleton University, Canada). Secure Systems Demo Day 2018 is part of Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security (HAIC) public outreach program, open to everyone and free of charge. Please register here.
February 28: The Finnish Cultural Foundation’s prize for outstanding cultural achievements (€30,000) was presented to Professor Emerita Kaisa Nyberg from Aalto University from her remarkable work on effective protection of information and secure communication. Read more from Aalto CS News.
February 5: HAIC public outreach lecture “Recent Trends in Cybercrime” by Yves Vandermeer, on Feb 22, in Dipoli, Espoo. The event is free of charge, but registration is required: https://haic-public-outreach.eventbrite.co.uk
January 8: The next Annual Demo Day will be held on June 20, 2018. Registration is open!

2017

December 15: Applications open to SECCLO – Master’s Programme in Security and Cloud Computing and Master’s Programme in Computer, Communication and Information Sciences – Major in Security and Cloud Computing at Aalto University. Scholarships available for top students!
December 8: Dr. Andrew Paverd and Dr. Kari Kostiainen (SSG alumnus) got the Best Reviewer Award in the WIFS 2017! Congratulations!
November 28: The application period to SECCLO begins next week Dec 4! Read more.
November 16: The European Commission has granted €2.9M funding for SECCLO – Master’s Programme in Security and Cloud Computing starting in 2018. See press release from Aalto University.
October 24: Klaudia Krawiecka’s masters thesis Improving Web Security Using Trusted Hardware has been selected as the best Information Security masters thesis in Finland for 2016-17. See press releases from Aalto News, Tietoturva, and Tivia.