Technical Seminars

Assured Sharing: Post-WikiLeaks Era Tensions in National-Security Information Sharing and Safeguarding

Mentor: Mr. Michael M. Johnson, chief scientist within the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories

A major challenge for the national-security enterprise is "assured sharing," information sharing with information assurance across organizations (horizontally) and across classification levels (vertically). Following the unlawful disclosure of classified information by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2010, the U.S. government leadership has been actively engaged in developing strategies, policies, and oversight mechanisms to enhance national security through responsible sharing and safeguarding of information. Numerous barriers remain to sharing information both within the national security enterprise (defense, intelligence, law enforcement, diplomacy, homeland security), and between federal national-security entities and state/local governments, private industry, and foreign governments. The failure to share information effectively within and between relevant entities has had disastrous effects on national security, as shown by the failure to "connect the dots" prior to the 9/11 attacks.

This focused exercise will examine the post-WikiLeaks era tensions in national-security information sharing and safeguarding. Through research, discussion, and strategic-planning sessions, participants will explore potential solutions spanning governance, policy, technology, culture, and economics to better manage these tensions. Example issues to be explored include the following:

• What issues surround the extended temporary retention of information about U.S. persons in support of national-security counterterrorism? We will discuss the concept of and potential challenges associated with recurrent vetting of information about U.S. persons while ensuring information safeguarding (and specifically, privacy and civil liberties protections). We will also explore the implications of subjecting the 99% of peaceful law-abiding citizens to undue oversight by the Intelligence Community.
• When can information collected by the U.S. government (e.g., visa applicant information or airline passenger name record information) be appropriately shared for national-security counterterrorism purposes? Does the presence of an "exigency" (i.e., a credible information about a threat) change the approach?
• What are the possible applications of software obfuscation and related cryptographic techniques to help make assured sharing a reality?

Prerequisites

• General interest in national security
• U.S. citizenship

Desired

• Diverse interests and backgrounds — individuals interested in law and policy are welcome, as are technocrats who would like to expand their perspectives

Information Analytics for Cyber Security

Mentor: Dr. Philip Kegelmeyer, senior scientist in the Computer Sciences and Information Systems Center at Sandia National Laboratories

Participants in this technical seminar will design and conduct an analysis of cyber security data to detect and characterize possible breaches and anomalies. Participants will also engage in an adversarial analysis of their methods. That is to say, they will consider and attempt to address an adversary who has partial or full knowledge of their analytic approaches.

Prerequisites

• Academic or extensive practical experience with supervised and unsupervised machine learning and statistical analysis
• Skills in using the Unix command line, especially its data manipulation tools
• Experience with writing substantial programs in at least one scripting language (e.g., Perl, Python, or Ruby)

Desired

• Familiarity with tensor mathematics and/or data analysis methods, such as singular-value decomposition or latent Dirichlet allocation
• Experience with Matlab and Unix open-source plotting tools

Public-Private Sector Responsibilities and Legal Issues in Our Nation's Cyber Defense

Mentor: Mr. Evan D. Wolff, member of the Sandia External Advisory Board on Homeland Security; partner at Hunton & Williams, LLP; and adjunct professor at the George Mason University School of Law

No longer just a technical problem, cyber security involves business, legal, policy, criminal, and government-relations issues — all of which are often layered and intertwined. As cyber security technology and how it is used evolve and change, so do the issues that private industry, government, and individuals must confront.

This technical seminar will explore these issues by working through a series of real-life scenarios:

• An IT corporation that suffers a loss of corporate data
• An infrastructure company that experiences unauthorized access and loses control of a crucial asset
• A government agency that is bombarded by a multipronged attack

During these scenarios, participants will have an opportunity to experience different roles, including those of citizens, business owners, government officials, and hackers.

Prerequisites

• Coursework in business, public policy, law, science, or information technology
• An open mind
• A willingness to evaluate issues from a variety of perspectives

Trusted Digital Systems Designed with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Mentor: Dr. Yalin Hu, principal member of the technical staff in the Cyber-Physical Systems Department at Sandia National Laboratories

Advances in the semiconductor industry have made field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) increasingly popular for implementing digital systems and prototyping application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). However, the delivery of trusted systems poses a major challenge since FPGAs contain various design-flow dependencies, including back doors where hardware Trojans can be introduced, thereby unexpectedly altering system functionality. Thus, verification of such systems is extremely important.

A design or verification engineer who wishes to successfully detect hardware Trojans must first understand FPGA design flow. This technical seminar will cover the basic components of FPGA design. Participants will begin with a hardware programming language and move all the way to a programmed FPGA device where they will identify the possible entry points for unwanted circuitry.

Prerequisites

• Solid coursework in electrical engineering/computer engineering, including digital logic design
• Familiarity with a hardware design language (e.g., Verilog or VHDL)
• Knowledge of FPGA devices