SINCONF 2024

Research interests : I'm a cryptographer living and working on Wurundjeri land in Southeastern Australia (near Melbourne). I am interested in cryptographic protocols that support a free and democratic society. I work on openly-available research and open source software for supporting democratic decisionmaking and empowering ordinary people to make choices about their own data.

Some highlights and favourite papers are:

• Cryptographic analysis of e-voting systems
• Auditing complex elections
• Privacy and open data
• Exposure Notification and contact tracing
• Verifiable voting from overseas voting centres
• Outside ANU

Biography: Sri Parameswaran is a Professor and the Head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Sydney. Prior this, he was a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Universtiy of New South Wales, and has also held the position of Acting Head of School at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales from 2019 to 2020. He has also served as the Program Director for Computer Engineering and Post Graduate Research Coordinator at the University of New South Wales, and was previously an academic at the University of Queensland. Sri Parameswaran has held visiting academic positions at Kyushu University in Japan and the University of California, Irvine, and worked as a consultant at NEC Research Labs in Princeton and the Asian Development Bank. He is currently a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts.

Biography: Willy Susilo is a Distinguished Professor, an IEEE Fellow, an IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) Fellow, and an ACS (Australian Computer Society) Fellow at the School of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences in University of Wollongong, Australia. In 2023, he has been awarded a prestigious ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. He is the director of Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology (iC2), School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong. Willy is an innovative educator and researcher. Currently, he is the Head of School of Computing and Information Technology at UOW (2015 - now). Prior to this role, he was awarded the prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2009. He was the former Head of School of Computer Science and Software Engineering (2009 - 2010) and the Deputy Director of ICT Research Institute at UOW (2006 - 2008). He is the Editor in Chief of the Computers Standards and Interface (Elsevier) and Information (MDPI) journal. He has served as an Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions in Information Forensics and Computing and he is currently serving as an Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions in Dependable and Secure Computing. Willy obtained his PhD from the University of Wollongong in 2001. He has published more than 500 research papers in journals and conference proceedings in cryptography and network security. He has served as the program committee member in dozens of international conferences. In 2016, he was awarded the Researcher of the Year award at UOW, due to his research excellence and contributions. His work on the creation of short signature schemes has been well cited and it is part of the IETF draft. In 2019, he was awarded the "Supervisor of the Year" award at UOW, due to his excellent supervision and mentoring experience. In 2020, he was awarded the "Vice Chancellors Award for Global Strategy" for his contribution to the University's internationalisation and global strategy.

Biography: Dr. Ian Oppermann is a founding director of ServiceGen, Government's Strategic Partner for Trusted Service Transformation. Ian is also an Industry Professor at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). From 2015 until 2023, Ian was the NSW Government’s Chief Data Scientist helping transform the way NSW understands and uses data and AI. Ian has 30 years experience in the ICT sector and has led organizations with more than 300 people, delivering products and outcomes that have impacted hundreds of millions of people globally. He has held senior management roles in Europe and Australia as Director for Radio Access Performance at Nokia, Global Head of Sales Partnering (network software) at Nokia Siemens Networks, and then Divisional Chief and Flagship Director at CSIRO. Ian is considered a thought leader in the area of the Digital Economy and is a regular speaker on “Big Data”, broadband enabled services and the impact of technology on society. He has contributed to 6 books and co-authored more than 120 papers which have been cited more than 3500 times. Ian has an MBA from the University of London and a Doctor of Philosophy in Mobile Telecommunications from Sydney University. Ian is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW, a Fellow and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society, and a graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Ian is also president of the Australia National Committee of the IEC and president of the JTC1 strategic advisory committee in Australia.

Deep devastation is felt when privacy is breached, personal information is lost, or property is stolen. Now imagine when all of this happens at once, and the victim is unaware of its occurrence until much later. This is the reality, as an increasing number of electronic devices are used as keys, wallets and files. Security attacks targeting embedded systems illegally gain access to information or destroy information. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used to protect many of these embedded systems. While mathematically shown to be quite secure, it is now well known that AES circuits and software implementations are vulnerable to side channel attacks. Side-channel attacks are performed by observing properties of the system (such as power consumption, electromagnetic emission, etc.) while the system performs cryptographic operations. In this talk, differing power-based attacks are described, and various countermeasures are explained. A countermeasure titled Algorithmic Balancing is described in detail. Implementation of this countermeasure in hardware and software is described. Since process variation impairs countermeasures, we show how this countermeasure can be made to overcome process variations. In the next part of the talk, Remote power attacks are described, and novel sensors are demonstrated which enable stealthy deployment of attacks on Cloud based FPGAs (such as the Amazon Cloud FPGA).

Brief Bio: Sri Parameswaran is the Head of School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Sydney. Prior to that he was a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. He also served as the Program Director for Computer Engineering. His research interests are in System Level Synthesis, Low power systems, High Level Systems, Security, Genomic Systems and Network on Chips. He served as the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, and has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, the EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems and the Design Automation of Embedded Systems. He has served on the Program Committees of Design Automation Conference (DAC), Design and Test in Europe (DATE), the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), the International Conference on Hardware/Software Code-sign and System Synthesis (CODES-ISSS), and the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES). Sri Parameswaran is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Data is the lifeblood of the modern economy. It impacts, enables and personalises how we work, play and engage socially and is also crucial for the operation of government and the economy. Banks and financial services companies can be described as data and digital services organisations with some bricks and mortar operations. Value comes from creating, using, protecting and sharing data. Use of data is a very wide and vague topic, incorporating analysis, storage, aggregation, dissemination and deletion. The value of data is unleashed through sharing. The challenge within any sharing or use relationship is “can I trust the data or data product you have tried to share with me?”. When that data product is a chart or an analytical insight, it is easier to apply tests on source of origin, governance and methods of analysis. When the data product is the output of complex AI systems, there is little in the way of frameworks to test the image, video, voice message or other generated result. This keynote seeks to outline frameworks which help answer important questions about data and products derived from data: How can I determine if data is fit for the purposes, I plan to use it for? How can I provide guidance / restrictions / prohibitions for future uses of the products I create from this data? How can I enforce restrictions / prohibitions for future uses of the products I create from data? How can I determine if a data product has been manipulated in ways that I did not expect?

Brief Bio: Dr Ian Oppermann is a Digital Economy thought leader, a highly-cited researcher, and a regular speaker about big data, broadband enabled services and the impact of technology on society. Ian is an Associate Industry Professor in the Faculty of Engineering & IT at UTS and the co-founder of ServiceGen. From 2015 to 2023, Ian was the NSW Government’s Chief Data Scientist working within the Department of Customer Service, where he chaired the 11-member NSW Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee that is advising the State Government on how it should use the technology. The committee also developed a world-first AI assurance framework for government projects. Ian has nearly 30 years’ experience in the Information and Communication Technology sector and has led large organizations that deliver products and services that have reached millions of people around the world. He has held senior management roles in Europe and Australia, including Director for Radio Access Performance at Nokia, Global Head of Sales Partnering (network software) at Nokia Siemens Networks, and Divisional Chief and Flagship Director at the CSIRO. He has contributed to six books and co-authored more than 120 papers, which have been cited more than 4000 times. Ian is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia, the IEEE, the NSW Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and is a Fellow and past President of the Australian Computer Society. He is also a graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, president of the Australia National Committee of the IEC, and president of the JTC1 strategic advisory committee in Australia.

Ian has an MBA from the University of London and a PhD in Mobile Telecommunications from the University of Sydney.

In this talk we will discuss some good ideas for election verification and evidence, as well as some recent examples of practical failures. We'll discuss the state of election security in Australia, and possibly the USA, and think about what technologists can do to improve the situation.

Brief Bio: Dr Vanessa Teague is an Associate Professor (Adjunct.) at the ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics. Dr Teague is a cryptographer living and working on Wurundjeri land in southeastern Australia (near Melbourne). She is interested in cryptographic protocols that support a free and democratic society. She works on openly-available research and open-source software for supporting democratic decision making and empowering ordinary people to make choices about their own data. Dr Teague’s research focuses primarily on cryptographic methods for achieving security and privacy, particularly for issues of public interest such as election integrity and the protection of government data. She was part of the team (with Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein) who discovered the easy re-identification of doctors and patients in the Medicare/PBS open dataset released by the Australian Department of Health. Joint work with Andrew Conway has identified several errors in deployed official Australian STV vote counting software, most of which was corrected as a consequence. She has co-designed numerous protocols for improved election integrity in e-voting systems, and co-discovered serious weaknesses in the cryptography of deployed e-voting systems in New South Wales, Western Australia and Switzerland.

Cloud computing is considered as one of the most prominent paradigms in the information technology industry, since it can significantly reduce the costs of hardware and software resources in computing infrastructure. This convenience has enabled corporations to efficiently use cloud storage as a mechanism to share data and cloud computing as a mechanism to outsource computing. One of the most important works in the area of cloud computing is how to provide security protections. The work in the cryptography literature has been very rich in this area, as it has been studied in the past two decades. In this lecture, we will revisit the topics that researchers have been studying. Specifically, we will provide an overview on what research topic that was studied, and currently being studied in the literature. We provide a comprehensive understanding of cloud computing research based on the published papers spanning from 2007 to 2023. Furthermore, we also discuss the gap between theory and the implementation of the proposed solutions.

Brief Bio: Willy Susilo is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences at the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia. He holds the most prestigious Australian Laureate Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council. He is the director of Institute of Cybersecurity and Cryptology, School of Computing and Information Technology, UOW. Recently, he was awarded the 2024 NSW Premier's Prizes for Science and Engineering due to his research work. He is an IEEE Fellow, an IET Fellow, an ACS Fellow, an AAIA Fellow and an AIIA Fellow. Previously, he was awarded the prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2009. He has published more than 500 papers in journals and conference proceedings in cryptography and network security. In 2016, he was awarded the ``Researcher of the Year” at UOW, due to his research excellence and contributions. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Information journal and the Special Content Editor of the Elsevier’s Computer Standards and Interfaces. He is also serving as an Associate Editors in several international journals, including IEEE Transactions. He has also served as the program committee member of several international conferences.