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Securing the World's Cyber Infrastructure

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CSIS News Archive

November 6, 2023

Cybersecurity Scholarships. Now accepting applications for the 2024-2025 Department of Defense (DoD) Cybersecurity Scholarship Program (CySP).


October 27, 2023

New Patent Applications. Two new patent applications with Dr. Albanese as co-inventor were published on October 26, 2023.


October 16, 2023

Security at our Fingertips. Emanuela Marasco is researching a novel method of identity verification using sweat samples from fingertips, as sweat contains unique metabolites that can discriminate between individuals. Her work involves hyperspectral imaging (HSI), providing a rapid and non-invasive means of identification.


April 6, 2023

New Assistant Professor at UT Dallas. Our Ph.D. student, Xinda Wang, will join the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2023.


April 6, 2023

Dr. Zhisheng Yan won Presidential Award. Prof. Zhisheng Yan was selected as a recipient of the Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence in Research in 2023. This is the second Presidential Award won by CSIS faculties in the past 2 years. 


December 8, 2022

CSIS alum elected IEEE fellow.  Vijayalakshmi Atluri has been named an IEEE Fellow for contributions to security and privacy for data and workflow systems.


October 17, 2022

CAE Tech Talks. Drs. Albanese and Sun will present their research in the CAE Tech Talk series on October 20, 2022. 


October 4, 2022

Internship Opportunity. Applications for the 2023 Virginia Cyber Navigator Internship Program are now being accepted.


September 22, 2022

Journal Editorial Boards. Dr. Albanese joins the Editorial Board of two journals.


September 21, 2022

Two papers in S&P 2023.  Dr. Sun has two papers being accepted by IEEE S&P 2023.


September 19, 2022

MITRE's Collaboration. MITRE's CWE Team mentions Dr. Albanese's work on CWE ranking and their collaboration with George Mason University on their website.


September 12, 2022

U.S. News Ranking. Mason's undergraduate cybersecurity program ranked 10th nationally among public universities, up from 15th, according to U.S. News & World Report.


June 13, 2022

Presidential Award.  Dr. Sun is recognized with the Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence in Research in 2022.


May 6, 2022

3 Papers in USENIX Security.  Dr. Sun has three papers being accepted by USENIX Security 2022. 


March 1, 2022

Election Security Workshop. Dr. Albanese is organizing and will co-chair the 1st International Workshop on Election Infrastructure Security (EIS 2022), to be co-located with ESORICS 2022.


February 7, 2022

NSF CAREER Award.  Dr. Yan received an NSF CAREER Award for his work on panoramic video compression.


January 19, 2022

Dr. Jajodia Named ACM Fellow. Sushil Jajodia was named an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow for his contributions to cybersecurity, data protection and privacy.


December 17, 2021

New Internship Opportunity. We are now accepting applications for the Virginia Cyber Navigator Internship Program (VA-CNIP), in partnership with the Virginia Department of Elections.


December 17, 2021

DoD Cybersecurity Scholarships. We are now accepting applications for the DoD Cybersecurity Scholarship Program. Applications are due on February 1, 2022.


November 13, 2021

IAPR CVIP 2021 paper.  Dr. Marasco and her PhD student have a paper accepted by CVIP 2021 on PAD in smartphones. 


November 13, 2021

IEEE Big Data Workshop paper.  Dr. Marasco and her PhD student have a paper accepted by IEEE Big Data for Multimodal AI 2021 on generalization strategies for robust security systems in mobiles.


October 12, 2021

Spring 2022 INNOVATE Cyber. INNOVATE Cyber is a paid ($1000) experiential learning opportunity via Zoom for cybersecurity and IT field undergraduate majors. Applications due by November 15.


September 28, 2021

Two new papers in SEC 2022.  Dr. Kun Sun has two papers being accepted by Usenix Security 2022. One paper is on hotpatching IOT devices, and another paper is about container registry typosquatting.


July 13, 2021

PatchDB Database Released!. We release a large-scale security patch dataset called PatchDB that contains around 12K security patches and 24K non-security patches from the real world. The related paper is published in DSN 2021.  


May 6, 2021

New Paper in CCS 2021.  Dr. Kun Sun has one paper titled "Locating the Security Patches for Disclosed OSS Vulnerabilities with Vulnerability-Commit Correlation Ranking" being accepted by CCS 2021. 


April 28, 2021

CCI Cyber Camp. The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative invites undergrads to join the CCI Cyber Camp. Registration closes on May 6, 2021.


April 5, 2021

New Postdoc Opening.  We have one postdoc opening. Please contact Dr. Kun Sun at ksun3@gmu.edu if interested. 


March 24, 2021

New Paper in DSN 2021. Dr. Kun Sun and his students have one paper titled "PatchDB: A Large-Scale Security Patch Dataset" being accepted by DSN 2021. 


December 7, 2020

IAPR CVIP 2020 Best Paper.  Two papers accepted by IAPR CVIP 2020. Dr. Marasco and her PhD student receive the best paper award of IAPR CVIP 2020


November 17, 2020

New Coverage. Dr. Kun Sun's work on secret security patch was covered by Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University. 


August 28, 2020

Dr. Jajodia becomes CCAA Director. Dr. Jajodia was appointed as the new Director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation, effective August 27, 2020. 


August 27, 2020

Media Coverage. Dr. Marasco's work on a contactless fingertip imaging system to detect COVID-19 was featured on health24.


August 24, 2020

IEEE McDowell Award. The IEEE Computer Society has recognized Dr. Jajodia with the 2020 W. Wallace McDowell Award for his “contributions to the scientific and engineering principles that enable adaptive cyber defense.” 


August 20, 2020

3 papers in CCS2020.  Dr. Kun Sun has three papers being accepted in CCS 2020. 


August 20, 2020

One paper accepted by ACSAC 2020. Dr. Kun Sun has one paper being accepted by ACSAC 2020. 


August 12, 2020

Media Coverage. Dr. Albanese was mentioned in a CIO article on how to prepare IT for a possible second wave of COVID-19.


July 28, 2020

Cyber Degrees EDU Ranking. Cyber Degrees EDU has ranked George Mason University #18 for the Best School to earn a Cyber Security Master's Degree.



June 16, 2020

Grant on COVID-19. Dr. Marasco received a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for COVID-19 related biometrics research. 


June 7, 2020

One paper accepted by CCS 2020. One paper titled "When the Differences in Frequency Domain are Compensated: Understanding and Defeating Modulated Replay Attacks on Automatic Speech Recognition" has been accepted by CCS 2020. 


June 3, 2020

One paper accepted by Raid 2020. One paper titled "SIEVE: Secure In-Vehicle Automatic Speech Recognition Systems" has been accepted by Raid 2020. 


February 19, 2020

Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge.  Graduate students will solve theoretical cyber crisis at competition.


February 3, 2020

New Grant from DOD.  Dr. Sun and Dr. Jajodia receives a new research grant on software security from DOD.


January 6, 2020

Cybersecurity Scholarships. Now accepting applications for the 2020-2021 Department of Defense (DoD) Cybersecurity Scholarship Program (CySP)


November 14, 2019

One paper accpeted by NDSS 2020 .  One paper titled "When Match Fields Do Not Need to Match: Buffered Packets Hijacking in SDN" has been accepted by NDSS 2020.


October 28, 2019

Job openings at IAI. Our industry partner Intelligent Automation Inc. has several openings in Security for BS, MS, and PhD graduates.


September 16, 2019

Paper accepted by CCS 2019.  One paper titled "Multisketches: Practical Secure Sketches Using Off-the-Shelf Biometric Matching Algorithms" has been accepted by the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2019


September 15, 2019

Grant from NIJ.  Dr. Marasco receives a grant from the National Institute of Justice - Research related to Accounting for Covariates in Forensic Error Rate Assessment and Evidence Interpretation.


August 27, 2019

Paper accepted by BTAS Special Session 2019. One paper titled "Biases in Fingerprint Recognition Systems: Where Are We At?" has been accepted by BTAS - Special Session on Generalizability and Adaptability in Biometrics 2019.


May 29, 2019

One paper accepted by RAID 2019. One paper titled "Fingerprinting SDN Applications via Encrypted Control Traffic" has been accepted by RAID 2019. 


May 3, 2019

CSIS News. Mason was named n.1 in Governors' Cyber Talent Discovery Program.


March 5, 2019

GraMSec 2019. Dr. Albanese will co-chair the 6th International Workshop on Graphical Models for Security


March 4, 2019

Two papers accepted by DSN 2019.. One full paper titled "SATIN: A Secure and Trustworthy Asynchronous Introspection on Multi-Core ARM Processors" accepted by DSN 2019. 


One short paper titled "Detecting "0-Day" Vulnerability: An Empirical Study of Secret Security Patch in OSS" accepted by DSN 2019. 


January 19, 2019

One paper accepted by USENIX Security'19. One paper titled "The CrossPath Attack: Disrupting the SDN Control Channel via Shared Links" has been accepted by USENIX Security19.


December 10, 2018

Cybersecurity Scholarships. Now accepting applications for the 2019-2020 Department of Defense (DoD) Cybersecurity Scholarship Program (CySP)


November 28, 2018

CSIS Undergraduate Student has a Research Paper accepted at IEEE Image and Video Forensics (IVF) 2019, Workshop in Conjunction with WACV.  Research study related to predicting liveness from latent fingerprints.


October 9, 2018

CSIS Undergraduate Student has a Research Paper accepted at IEEE Image Processing Theory and Applications (IPTA) 2018.  Research study related to the detection of non-cooperative presentation attacks to fingerprint sensors


October 1, 2018

New MURI Award. Dr. Jajodia received a $7.5M MURI award from the Office of Naval Research for the project "Generating Documents that are Consistent with a Knowledge Base."


September 6, 2018

NSF IUCRC Phase II Award. Sushil Jajodia, Massimiliano Albanese, Rajesh Ganesan, Emanuela Marasco, and Kun Sun received funding from the National Science Foundation for their project “Phase II IUCRC George Mason University: Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA)”.


August 24, 2018

New DoD Scholarship Award. Dr. Jajodia and Dr. Albanese received a $159,612 award from NSA to administer the DoD Cybersecurity Scholarship Program (CySP).


August 21, 2018

New NSF funding Award. Dr. Kun Sun received a funding award from NSF for project titled "SaTC: TTP: Small: Enhancing Container Security via Fine-Grained System Resource Constraints".


August 16, 2018

GRA and Postdoc Positions Available. CSIS has several GRA and Post-Doctoral positions available in the area of systems and network security. Please contact Prof. Kun Sun. 


August 13, 2018

NSF Workshop on SPS. Dr. Kun Sun co-chaires an NSF Community-Building Workshop on Programmable System Security in a Software Defined World at George Mason University with Guofei Gu (TAMU), David Ott (VMware), and Vyas Sekar (CMU). This workshop is sponsored by NSF CISE.


August 7, 2018

New NSF Funding Award. Dr. Kun Sun received a funding award from NSF for a project titled "Visioning Workshop on Programmable Security in a Software-Defined World".


July 30, 2018

Best Paper Award at SECRYPT 2018. AwardThe paper "A Quantitative Framework to Model Advanced Persistent Threats," by  L.H. Pham, M. Albanese, and B.W. Priest received the Best Paper Award at the 15th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2018),  Porto, Portugal, July 26-28, 2018.


June 20, 2018

Dr. Marasco interviewed at CVPR. Dr. Marasco was interviewed by CVPR Daily, in the Women in Science section.  


May 11, 2018

Doctoral GRA position .  CSIS has an opening, effective immediately, for a Doctoral GRA in the area of Biometrics.


April 5, 2018

Story about Vincenzo Piuri. Prof. Vincenzo Piuri, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Milan, Italy, and a visiting researcher at the Center for Secure Information Systems, has been featured in a story on the Volgenau School's website. Prof. Piuri is a candidate for the position of 2019 IEEE President-Elect.


March 27, 2018

Jajodia ranked 78th worldwide, 60th in US. Based on the H-index metric, Sushil Jajodia is ranked 78th worldwide, 60th in the United States, and 1st at George Mason University among scientists in the area of Computer Science and Electronics.


March 19, 2018

Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge. CSIS Student Keith Pham competes in the Atlantic Council Cyber 9/12 Student Challenge


February 22, 2018

2019 IEEE Elections. Vincenzo PiuriCSIS proudly endorses Prof. Vincenzo Piuri for election as the 2019 IEEE President-Elect.


February 1, 2018

School Rankings. CyberDegrees.com has ranked George Mason University no. 8 in their list of the top 20 cyber security schools in the country!


January 23, 2018

DoD Scolarship Program. DoD IASPThe deadline to apply for the DoD Information Assurance Scholarship Program is fast approaching. Apply by February, 12 2018!


October 10, 2017

CSIS in the News. A story about Dr. Albanese has appeared on the website of the Volgenau School of Engineering.


July 10, 2017

New CSIS faculty. Dr. Emanuela Marasco will join CSIS in Fall 2017.


June 25, 2018

Dr. Marasco interviewed at CVPR.  Dr. Marasco was interviewed by CVPR Daily in the Women in Science section.


September 12, 0018

New MURI Award.  Dr. Sushil Jajodia received a MURI award from the Office of Naval Research in the amount of $7.5m for the project "Generating Documents that are Consistent with a Knowledge Base."