Congratulations to the Texas A&M team for winning 3^rd place in the Embedded Security Challenge at the CSAW ’18 cyber-security competition held November 8-11, 2018 in Brooklyn, New York.

The Texas A&M team was comprised of Computer and Electrical Engineering students Ryan Vrecenar (CE), Joshua Zschiesche (CS), Michael Hall (EE) and Mahesh Naidu (EE) under the advisement of professors Stavros Kalafatis and JV Rajendran.

Our team demonstrated an attack on a Bluetooth bulb, showed that they were able to hack it and modify the light color, turned it on/off, and transmitted data, which essentially covered all aspects of how exposed this embedded system is to hacking. Their skills were judged against teams from around the world.

This was the second time the Texas A&M team had entered the competition. Last year, they placed fourth in the challenge. They have truly set themselves apart nationally within such a short period.

For more information on the event, go to https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu.

As cybersecurity emerges as a significant differential for economic progress across the globe, an open dialog between cybersecurity experts and governments becomes critical in influencing the global community and ensuring a safe cyberspace for the world economy.

A team of Aggies researching these cybersecurity issues has won the Global Cyber Challenge Peace-a-thon at the 2017 Global Conference on Cyber Space (GCCS), which was inaugurated by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, in New Delhi, India.

Bharadwaj Satchidanandan, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, is the team lead for “Aggies” – the Texas A&M team that emerged as the winner of Best International Team award at the hackathon challenge. Satchidanandan’s team included his research advisor, Dr. P.R. Kumar, College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering and Distinguished Professor in the electrical and computer engineering department.

“Cyberspace remains a key area for innovation,” said Modi in a speech at the conference. “Nations must take responsibility to ensure that the digital space does not become a playground for the dark forces of terrorism and radicalization. Information sharing and coordination among security agencies is essential to counter the ever-changing threat landscape.”

Finalists for the challenge consisted 15 teams from India, Canada, United States, France and Argentina.

The hackathon began with 14 problem statements in the area of cybersecurity and privacy. The teams had 36 hours to present their solution to the problem statements and develop a proof of concept demonstrating their solution, and Satchidanandan presented Texas A&M Engineering’s video on his research with Kumar. A jury selected the winners based on a pre-decided evaluation framework. Modi presented the winners with their awards after the event.

Delegates and officials representing more than 120 countries attended the GCCS event, which was launched in 2011 to establish the internationally agreed “rules of the road” for behavior in cyberspace.

“We as a society are becoming more and more reliant on the cyberspace,” said Satchidanandan when asked about his biggest takeaway from the event and what he would like the local community to know about the cybersecurity issues he is studying. “The technical community, policy makers and law enforcement agencies are hard at work behind the scenes to ensure that the privacy and security of each individual is ensured in the digital domain.”

Aggie Bharadwaj Satchidanandan accepting the Best International Team award from India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Also seen in the picture are India’s Law & Justice, Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad (first from left) and Sri Lanka’s Ranil Wickremesinghe (fourth from left)

Original Post: https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2017/11/29/aggie-sweeps-hackathon-challenge-gets-honored-by-indias-prime-minister.html

Dr. P.R. Kumar was elected Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). He is among five foreign fellows elected this year.

INAE is an autonomous institution with a membership comprising of the most distinguished engineers, engineer-scientists and technologists from all branches of engineering, technology and related sciences. Up to 50 fellows from academia, industry and government are elected every year. Election to INAE is by nomination only.

Kumar is a College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering and a distinguished professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering (electronics) from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1973, and the Master of Science and Doctor of Science degrees in systems science and mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1975 and 1977, respectively

Kumar studies problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants and information theory. His research focus currently includes cybersecurity, privacy, cyberphysical systems, wireless networks, smart grid, autonomous vehicles and unmanned air vehicle systems.

Kumar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the U.S., and a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences.

Original Post: 1/19/18 at https://engineering.tamu.edu/news.html

Dr. I-Hong Hou and Dr. P.R. Kumar, part of our CESG faculty, contributed to the Best Paper Award from the Eighteenth International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (ACM MobiHoc 2017) earlier this year. The paper was selected as the best paper out of 179 submissions – which is truly a feat to be recognized!

Title:   “Throughput-Optimal Scheduling for Multi-Hop Networked Transportation Systems With Switch-Over Delay”

Abstract:   The emerging connected-vehicle technology provides a new dimension for developing more intelligent traffic control algorithms for signalized intersections. An important challenge for scheduling in networked transportation systems is the switchover delay caused by the guard time before any traffic signal change. The switch-over delay can result in significant loss of system capacity and hence needs to be accommodated in the scheduling design. To tackle this challenge, we propose a distributed online scheduling policy that extends the well-known Max-Pressure policy to address switch-over delay by introducing a bias factor favoring the current schedule. We prove that the proposed policy is throughput-optimal with switch-over delay. Furthermore, the proposed policy remains optimal when there are both connected signalized intersections and conventional fixed-time ones in the system. With connected-vehicle technology, the proposed policy can be easily incorporated into the current transportation systems without additional infrastructure. Through extensive simulation in VISSIM, we show that our policy indeed outperforms the existing popular policies.

Full list of authors:   I-Hong Hou, Ping-Chun Hsieh, Jian Jiao, P. R. Kumar, Xi Liu, and Yunlong Zhang

Congratulations to all!