Security & privacy

Students learn to ‘think like a hacker’

11/09/17 EdScoop — Through a partnership with HackerOne's bug bounty platform, students in EECS professor Doug Tygar's computer science class are gaining real-world experience in cybersecurity and ethical hacking - with the potential for real-world payoffs.

Bot-spotting college kids, doing what Twitter won’t

11/01/17 Wired — Berkeley computer science undergrads Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte are doing what they say Twitter won't: sorting out and tagging the angry propaganda bots designed to undermine, destabilize and inflame American political discourse.

Berkeley experts on how to build more secure, faster AI systems

10/16/17 — In a new report from Berkeley's Real-Time Intelligent Secure Execution Lab (RISELab), leading researchers outline challenges in systems, security and architecture that may impede the progress of artificial intelligence, and propose new research directions to address them.

Defending the Internet from spear fishing

08/23/17 — At the USENIX Security Conference in Vancouver this month, a team of computer science researchers from Berkeley Engineering won the 2017 Internet Defense Prize - and a $100,000 award - for their new approach to detecting credential spear phishing attacks.

Tracking the smartphone apps that are tracking you

06/06/17 Fast Company — The Haystack Project, a multi-institution collaboration at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute, aims give those with mobile devices more control to police what apps do with their location and other personal data.

Reading minds

05/01/17 — The BioSENSE Lab has created a “pass-thought” reader to authenticate wearers by reading their brainwaves.

A “VAST” step forward in cybersecurity

03/15/17 Berkeley Research — Working closely with cybersecurity experts at Berkeley Lab, CS professor Vern Paxson and postdoc researcher Matthias Vallentin are developing VAST, a system to help forensic analysts pinpoint how much of an organization's computer network has been compromised - and where.

Countering extremism with technology

03/13/17 — Every Thursday afternoon, students gather in a light-filled teaching studio of Jacobs Hall to develop technology-based solutions to a very tangible problem: ideologically motivated violence in the United States.

WikiLeaks says it has obtained trove of CIA hacking tools

03/08/17 Washington Post — Nicholas Weaver (Ph.D.'03 CS), a senior researcher at the Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute, says the massive collection of CIA hacking data being released by WikiLeaks "is probably legitimate or contains a lot of legitimate stuff."

How a grad student found spyware that could control anybody’s iPhone

12/07/16 Vanity Fair — Last summer, computer science Ph.D. candidate Bill Marczak stumbled across a program that could spy on an iPhone's contact list and messages - and even record calls. Illuminating shadowy firms that sell spyware to corrupt governments across the globe, Marczak's story reveals the new arena of cyber-warfare.

Hashtagging the way to safer infrastructure

11/29/16 — Civil and environmental engineering professor Kenichi Soga delivered a CITRIS talk about using social media and sensor-laden environments to build smart infrastructure.

Toward human-centric A.I.

09/20/16 — Twenty years ago, Stuart Russell co-wrote a book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, destined to become the dominant text in its field. Near the end of the book, he posed a question: “What if A.I. does succeed?”

phasor measurement unit and EECS professor Alexandra von Meier

Detecting cybersecurity threats by taking the grid’s pulse

08/10/16 IEEE Spectrum — EECS professor Alexandra von Meier and power quality expert Alex McEachern set out to build an advanced power sensor for utility distribution grids, and accidentally produced a promising tool to protect those grids from cyber attack.

Berkeley hosts high school students for cyber training

08/04/16 Campus Technology — A cyber security program sponsored by the National Security Agency has wooed 23 students to attend a six-week course at the Berkeley. The CYBEAR initiative is part of a nationwide effort to introduce K-12 students to safe online behavior and spark their interest in pursuing careers in the field.

Voice commanad prompt on an Android phone

How secret voice commands in YouTube could hijack your phone

07/18/16 PCWorld — EECS Ph.D. student Nick Carlini, professor David Wagner and a team of Georgetown University researchers have revealed how secret commands could use voice-control tools like Siri and Google Now to take over your smartphone.

Fingerprint scanner

05/01/16 — Fingerprint scanning technology is advancing to create three-dimensional images of a fingerprint to eliminate the risk of counterfeited two-dimensional images, offering more security.

Tech titans create nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence

12/15/15 Bloomberg Business — A group of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has established a nonprofit organization to develop "digital intelligence" that will benefit humanity. “This collection of people is stunning,” said EECS professor and company adviser Pieter Abbeel, who said he expects the company's research and ideas to be “impressive and surprising.”

Battling malware from within

10/22/15 PC Magazine — In a keynote address at the MalCon 2015 conference, EECS professor Vern Paxson offered an innovative idea for handling large-scale security problems like malware distribution, fake accounts and spam-spewing botnets: infiltrate the attacker from the outset.

EECS faculty members awarded NSF grants for cybersecurity research

10/08/15 National Science Foundation — Three EECS faculty members, David Wagner, Dawn Song and Sanjit Seshia, were awarded cybersecurity research grants from the National Science Foundation. The grants are part of NSF's $74.5 million Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program.

Cyber-defense and forensic tools turn 20

08/14/15 National Science Foundation — In 1995, when Vern Paxson (now an EECS professor) was a doctoral student at Berkeley, he began writing what eventually became Bro, the ground-breaking open source cybersecurity software that was used to build a network monitoring framework. Today Bro is used by many of the largest supercomputing centers, national labs, universities and Fortune 10 companies.