2024
Dec. 5: International Visit
The Center for Cybersecurity hosted an international delegation from Palestine, in collaboration with World Chicago and the US Department of State. The discussion included possible technical collaboration in cybersecurity events, educational and training opportunities, and an overview of the research activities of the Center for Cybersecurity.
Nov 26: NCL Fall 2024 Power Rankings
Loyola University Chicago ranked 40th in the National Cyber League (NCL) Fall 2024 power rankings. Well done to all the students who participated! Loyola's best team, consisting of Sloan Luckie, Laila Hamdan, Hesam Sadeghian, Christian Vasquez, Aslihan Aldintal, Luke Niemeyer, and Gulnaz Zholshy, scored 2,685 points out of 3,100 and ranked 35th out of 532 teams. In the Individual Game, our top students, Josh Honig, Nathan Ferrell, and Aslihan Altindal scored 2,730, 2,565, and 2,410 points respectively.
Nov 25: CS Seminar
Great presentation on 11/22 by our faculty Dr. Moreira, and students Mr. Honig and Mr. Ferrell on source attribution and web privacy.
Nov 21: SCiP Presentation
Graduate student Arrianna Szymczak presented a talk on "User Personality, User-Generated Password and Similarity to Other Users" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Psychology (SCIP) on November 21 in New York City. This research is a collaborative work with Oklahoma State University and included both undergraduate and graduate students Anna Bakas, William Mack, Anne Wagner, and Robert Bitunjac. Work is funded by the NSF DGE 1918591 and 1919004.
Nov 23: WiCyS/7968/MIT TechFusion Gala
The WiCyS (Women in Cybersecurity) student chapter, the 7968 cybersecurity competitions club, and the Minorities in Tech (MIT) co-hosted a TechFusion Gala on Friday November 22, 2024. The Gala was also a fundraising event, raising some funds for ChiArts. Thank you to all who participated!
Nov 19: CS Seminar
Thank you to SPR and CTO Matthew Mead for giving a talk during our Fall 2024 Computer Science Seminar!
Nov 15: WiCyS/7968 Murder Mystery Event
The WiCyS (Women in Cybersecurity) student chapter and 7968 cybersecurity competitions club co-hosted a murder mystery Capture the Flag competition on Friday November 15, 2024.
Nov 15: FBI Visit
Thank you to the Special Agents from the FBI who came to talk to our students on November 15. We had a room packed with almost 50 students! The visit included a recruitment talk about both the special agents route and the professional staff route, along with what kind of cybersecurity work the FBI is doing.
Nov 13: DoE Cyberforce Competition
Loyola participated in the annual Department of Energy Cyberforce competition in St. Charles, Illinois on November 8-9, 2024. A team consisting of captain Josh Honig, Chloe Kilroy, Lynette Lim, Daniel Gaevskiy, Nathan Ferrell, and Sophia Homan, defended their smart city against a professional red team while ensuring that services were up and that the website was fully functional. Throughout the competition, the team also solved various anomalies. The team coach was Dr. Eric Chan-Tin. Loyola ranked 14th out of 94 teams at the competition. Go Ramblers!
Nov 11: CS Seminar Fall Series 2024
Great conversation at the 11/08 CS Seminar with two excellent speakers: Paul Edlund from Microsoft and Satyaki Sikdar from Loyola University Chicago. Paul discussed a range of topics from cybersecurity to AI to crypto to passwords while Satyaki showed us how everything is connected in a network!
Nov 6: Congrats to Kelly McCabe
Congratulations to Kelly McCabe, a senior in cybersecurity, for being awarded the prestigious President's Medallion! Kelly is expected to graduate in May 2025. From Kelly: "“God’s strength and hard work have driven me to succeed.”
Nov 1: CS Seminar
Dr. Sang-Yoon Chang from the University of Colorado - Colorado Spring and Mr. Kevin Woghiren from United Airlines gave two entertaining talks on cybersecurity of mobile networking, blockchain, and the aviation industry.
Oct 30: ACM Senior Member
Congratulations to Dr. Eric Chan-Tin for being recognized as an ACM Senior Member in 2024. From the ACM website, "The Senior Members Grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and at least 5 years of Professional Membership in the last 10 years, who have demonstrated performance through technical leadership, and technical or professional contributions."
Oct 29: UND Cyberhawks Final
Two teams from Loyola participated in the UND Cyberhawks final competition on October 29. Pictured are Nathan Ferrell and Christian Vasquez. The other team consisted of Daniel Gaevskiy, Lynette Lim, Chloe Kilroy, and Josh Honig.
Oct 23: WiCyS Career Talk Event
On October 23, Loyola WiCyS student chapter hosted a career talk event, with two speakers: Claudia Holtsclaw from Motorola Solutions and Katherine Quinn from Northern Trust.
Oct 22: Hivestorm competition
Loyola University Chicago participated in the 2024 Hivestorm competition, ranking 62nd out of 413 teams. The team consisted of Josh Honig (captain), Laila Hamdan, Nathan Ferrell, and Sophia Homan. Go Ramblers!
Oct 16: WiCyS Career Building Event
On October 16, Loyola WiCyS student chapter hosted a career building event with speakers from Accenture.
Oct 16: 2024-2025 Motorola Solutions Foundation Scholarship
Congrats to Alexis Fenderson, Bridget Gorman, Kelly McCabe, Nancy Rojas, Nika Primus, and Sloan Luckie for being selected as the 2024-2025 Motorola Solutions Foundation Cybersecurity Experiential Scholars! This program, led by Dr. Eric Chan-Tin, introduces students to hands-on cybersecurity practice, such as national cybersecurity competitions. This program is made possible by a generous grant from Motorola Solutions Foundation. #MotoSolutionsCares
Oct 4: CISA Visit
A couple of CISA cybersecurity advisors came to talk to our students and scholars about working at CISA.
Sep 27: UND Cyberhawks
Congratulations to Christian Vasquez, Nathan Ferrell, Chloe Kilroy, Lynette Lim, Daniel Gaevskiy, and Josh Honig for competing at the 2024 UND Cyberhawks qualifiers competitions!
All three Loyola teams made it to the finals, ranking 8th, 15th, and 17th on the university rankings scoreboard. The finals for the competition is on Monday October 28, 2024! Go Ramblers!
Engaged Scholars Faculty Fellow
Congratulations to Dr. Eric Chan-Tin. He is recognized as a 2024-2026 Engaged Scholarship Faculty Fellow by the Center for Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship (CELTS) at Loyola University Chicago. As part of the fellowship, Dr. Chan-Tin will work on engaging students to participate in cybersecurity competitions.
Presentation at Blue Team Con!
Josh Honig and Nathan Ferrell presented a talk "Website Fingerprinting: Predicting User Behavior Based on Encrypted Metadata Using Machine Learning" at Blue Team Con on September 8, 2024.
CyberRamblers: New Cohort!
The new 2024-2026 cohort of the CyberRamblers CyberCorps Scholarship for Service has been selected.
Congratulations to Chloe Kilroy, Lynette Lim, and Daniel Gaevskiy!
If you are interested in applying, please check the website at https://cyberramblers.cs.luc.edu.
Aug. 26, 2024: Welcome to the new Academic Year!
Welcome to the new academic year!
Here are some useful tips to start the new year strong!
- Stay tuned to announcements from the Sakai page - this includes cybersecurity meetups, scholarships, competitions, and other events
- Join a club such as Don't Panic!, Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Loyola chapter, and 7968 cybersecurity competitions club
Paper at ACISP 2024
Madeline Moran (pictured) presented an interdisciplinary research paper from Computer Science, Psychology, and Criminal Justice & Criminology, titled "Deep Dive on Relationship between Personality and Password Creation" at the 29th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP) in Sydney, Australia. This is joint worked between Loyola University Chicago and Oklahoma State University.
Authors are Madeline Moran, Arrianna Szymczak, Anna Hart, Shelia Kennison, Eric Chan-Tin
LUC Students at INSuRE+E Summer 2024
Nathan Ferrell and Arrianna Szymczak participated in the INSuRE+E program at Iowa State University during Summer 2024.
For more information, see this LinkedIn Post
New NSF Award!
The CS Department Chair, Dr. George K. Thiruvathukal, has received an EAGER award from the National Science Foundation’s Clean Energy Technology initiative. The project is a collaboration with Dr. Jamie Davis and Dr. Yung-Hsiang Lu at Purdue University and Dr. Konstantin Läufer at Loyola University Chicago aims to tackle a pressing issue: the growing energy consumption of data centers.
Data centers currently consume about 2% of the U.S.'s energy, and this number is set to rise. The goal is simple but ambitious: make data centers–and the software running on them--more energy-efficient. The project leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to optimize software energy use. By optimizing software to use less energy, there could be a cut down on the overall energy footprint of data centers.
The project is also focused on education by developing new educational materials on energy efficiency, which will be available online and presented at a workshop in the second year of the project.
The approach is twofold:
1) Energy-Efficient Software: LLMs are used to create smarter, energy-saving software solutions for data centers. These models learn and adapt, providing real-time feedback to improve efficiency.
2) Educational Materials: a new framework for teaching energy efficiency will be created, emphasizing systems thinking. This holistic approach helps students understand the broader impact of energy use and find innovative solutions.
The project is structured around three main thrusts:
1) Measuring the impact of LLMs on energy-efficient programming.
2) Creating and sharing new educational materials.
3) Hosting a workshop to disseminate our findings.
If successful, this project could revolutionize energy-aware software engineering and education. We’re excited to see the positive changes it can bring to both the tech industry and the environment.
For more information about our NSF grant, see https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2343595.
Invited Speaker at GenCyber
June 25, 2024: Dr. Chan-Tin was invited at the Oklahoma State University NSF/NSA supported GenCyber Teacher Camp on "Cybercrime and Preventions".
US Cyber Games Open 2024
Congratulations to Chloe Kilroy for scoring 900 points and placing 531 out of 3,100 participants at the US Cyber Games Open 2024!
Best paper award!
A paper titled "Unmasking the Vulnerabilities of Deep Learning Models: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Adversarial Attacks and Defenses" has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the 5th Silicon Valley Cybersecurity Conference (SVCC) 2024. This research is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Sungkyunkwan University and Loyola University Chicago, led by authors Firuz Juraev, Mohammed Abuhamad, Eric Chan-Tin, George K. Thiruvathukal, and Tamer Abuhmed. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of black-box adversarial attacks and defenses on deep learning (DL) models, highlighting the increased serious threat that can cause the DL model to misbehave and compromise the performance of critical applications that are using these vulnerable models.
"This research addresses a critical aspect of deep learning by focusing on the robustness of models against adversarial attacks," said Dr. Sean Choi, session chair of SVCC 2024. " Their findings provide invaluable insights that will help enhance the security and reliability of DL models in various safety-critical domains."
The paper's key contributions include a thorough investigation of various black-box attacks on diverse DL architectures. The authors demonstrate that while model complexity correlates with increased robustness, the number of model parameters alone does not ensure higher resilience to existing attacks. The research also explores how different components used in the model and training datasets impact model robustness, revealing significant insights for security-critical applications.
This award-winning research has significant real-world implications, particularly for enhancing the security and reliability of DL models in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving, healthcare and medical diagnosis, industrial automation, and surveillance. The findings emphasize the necessity of robust DL models that can withstand adversarial attacks, making it crucial to understand and defend against these threats. This study paves the way for future research on advanced attacks and the robustness of various DL architectures, including Vision Transformers, Graph Neural Networks, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).
Undergraduate Summer Research Experience (USRE) Program
Four computer science undergraduates recently showcased their research at the College of Arts and Sciences’ Undergraduate Summer Research Experience (USRE) program. Over the past four weeks, these students worked on their projects and presented their findings on Friday to an audience of students, staff, faculty, family, and friends.
Francis Olakangil, mentored by Dr. George Thiruvathukal, researched how to make software more portable and secure. His project, “Enhancing Software Portability and Security: A Systematic Evaluation of Unikernels and Library OS Containerization,” looked at new technologies that could improve software performance and safety.
Lynette Lim and Katarina Krivokapic, working with Dr. Eric Chan-Tin, studied ways to slow the spread of misinformation. Their project, “Slowing Spread of Misinformation Through Inoculation,” aimed to find methods to help people recognize and resist false information.
Kentaro Fujii, also mentored by Dr. Eric Chan-Tin, focused on protecting user privacy online. His research, “Defense Against Website Fingerprinting Attacks,” explored techniques to prevent tracking of users’ web activities.
The USRE program (more information at USRE Program) gives students the chance to do hands-on research and learn from experienced mentors. The presentations on June 14 highlighted the impressive work these students accomplished, showing great promise for the future of computer science.
Commencement 2024
Congratulations to all students who graduated this past May!
IEEE S&P 2024
Poster "Encrypted Network Traffic Analysis" at IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2024 in San Francisco, CA and short talk on "The State of Network Traffic Analysis".
Pictured are Jack West (BS '20, MS '22), Josh Honig, Madeline Moran, and Eric Chan-Tin
Josh presented the short talk and Josh and Madeline were both the poster presenters.
Panelist at CISO Council with Palo Alto
Dr. Chan-Tin was one of the panelists at a CISO Council on "The Current Threat Landscape & Staying a Step Ahead of Future Cyber Trends" with Palo Alto, DoorDash, Schneider Electric. More information at C-Vision website
NCL Cyber Power Rankings Spring 2024
The NCL Spring 2024 season is over! Loyola University Chicago ranked 26th National, 8th in Central Region and 16th for CAE institutions Individual Game: Out of 7,407 individuals competing, Joshua Honig ranked 45th with 2,730 points, Nathan Ferrell ranked 269th with 2,235 points and Sophia Homan ranked 618th with 1,755 points. Team Game: Our team consisting of Madeline Moran, Sophia Homan, Nathan Ferrell, Arrianna Szymczak, Joshua Honig, and Daniel Gaevskiy, ranked 43rd out of 4,199 teams with 2,580 points. Congrats to all students who competed! NCL Cyber Power Rankings
Loyola Undergraduate Research and Experience Symposium
Several students presented their poster at the annual 2024 Loyola Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium. The students are Maddie Juarez, Arrianna Szymczak, Erin Robertson, Nancy Rojas, Laila Hamdan, Sophia Homan, Sloan Luckie, Tanner Dudersdadt, Joi Rae Connor, Victoria Ward, and Rylee Abaya.
Loyola Graduate Student Mentor Award
Congratulations to Isaac Ahlgren, who was awarded the Loyola Graduate Student Mentor award on April 20, 2024 at the Loyola Undergraduate Research & Engagement Symposium Award Ceremony. Full list of awards and nominees
April 15, 2024
New paper to be published at ACISP 2024.
Authors: Madeline Moran, Arrianna Szymczak, Anna Hart, Shelia Kennison, and Eric Chan-Tin
Title: Deep Dive on Relationship between Personality and Password Creation
Sponsor: National Science Foundation and Dr. Scholl Foundation
April 11, 2024
Madeline Moran, Anisa Ramos, and Nika Primus attended the 2024 Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) conference in Nashville, TN from April 11 to April 13, 2024.
March 30, 2024
Loyola University Chicago ranked #35 in the CursedCTC competition. Well done to all students who participated!
March 24, 2024
Two teams from Loyola University Chicago participated in JerseyCTF.
7968.2 consisting of Josh Honig and Arrianna Szymczak ranked #69 out of 520 teams.
7968 consisting of Eno Dynowski, Nathan Ferrell, Seaver Olson, and Sloan Luckie ranked #147 out of 520 teams.
Go Ramblers!
March 23, 2024
A team from Loyola University Chicago, consisting of Hannah Traud, Mariana Hernandez, Nika Primus, Devon Griffith, Caitlin McHale, and Mahnoor Aftab, participated in the 2024 NCAE Cyber Games competition. MVP was Hannah Traud and Most Improved Player was Mariana Hernandez. Congrats to all!
March 22, 2024
Tanner Dudersdadt, Joi Rae Connor, Victoria Ward, and Rylee Abaya, mentored by Dr. Chan-Tin and Dr. Stalans, presented a poster titled "Examining Misinformation on Social Media Sites and the Characteristics that Predict Why It Spreds" at the 2024 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) in Chicago, IL on March 22.
March 15, 2024
Two teams from Loyola University Chicago competed in the VIVID competition from March 11 to March 14. Team 1 (7968) consisted of Josh Honig, Madeline Moran, Nathan Ferrell, Mahnoor Aftab, and Sophia Homan. Team 2 (Loyola 2) consisted of Arrianna Szymczak and Laila Hamdan. Pictured are Josh, Lucy, Nathan, Sophia, Mahnoor, and Madeline. The teams ranked 29th and 44th respectively out of 91 teams and 65 unique institutions. Congrats to all!
March 12, 2024
Dr. Chan-Tin, Director for the Loyola Center for Cybersecurity, was one of the Vision Voice speakers at the CISO Chicago Think Tank on March 12. See https://www.cvisionintl.com/events/think-tank/2024-mar-12-ciso-tt-chicago-1/ for the event's agenda.
February 17, 2024
Loyola University Chicago participated in the Midwest Regionals of the CCDC (Cyber Collegiate Defense Competition) on Saturday February 17. This is the second time Loyola participated in this national competition and ranked above average. Well done to all! The team consisted of Josh Honig (captain), Nathan Ferrell, Sophia Homan, Erin Robertson, Sloan Luckie, Arrianna Szymczak, Laila Hamdan, and Nancy Rojas. This was the first competition for Erin, Sloan, Arrianna, Laila, and Nancy!
Loyola awarded a $3.8 million NSF award to establish a CyberCorps SFS program
December 19, 2023
The program, "CyberCorps Scholarship for Service: CyberRamblers Bolster National Security", will provide scholarships to undergraduate students majoring in the BS in Cybersecurity major. The CyberRamblers scholars will then continue their career by working in an executive branch of the government.