News 2015: Engineering student Matthew Crossman (ECE) wins Best Paper Award at the Homeland Security Conference

News 2015: Engineering student Matthew Crossman (ECE) wins Best Paper Award at the Homeland Security Conference
Engineering student Matthew Crossman (ECE) wins Best Paper Award at the Homeland Security Conference

Matthew A. Crossman, ECE Senior, won the Conference Best Paper Award, jointly with his advisor Prof. Hong Liu, at 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST), for their paper titled "Study of Authentication with IoT Testbed".

Matthew A. Crossman, ECE Senior, won the Conference Best Paper Award, jointly with his advisor Prof. Hong Liu, at 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST), for their paper titled "Study of Authentication with IoT Testbed". This is the highest award presented by the conference.

HST is the leading science and technology symposium devoted to homeland security. The conference has an outstanding program of plenaries, technical papers, poster sessions and tutorial session. Produced by IEEE with technical support from DHS S&T, IEEE Boston Section, IEEE Biometrics Council, and IEEE-USA and organizational support from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Raytheon, Battelle, and MITRE, the event showcases selected technical papers and posters highlighting emerging technologies in four tracks:

  • Cyber Security
  • Attack and Disaster Preparation, Recovery, and Response
  • Land and Maritime Border Security
  • Biometrics and Forensics

General Chair, Dr. James Flavin of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, presented five awards: four Track Best Papers and one Conference Best Paper on April 14th, 2015. The winner of the Cyber Security track, where Crossman and Liu's paper belongs, went to Dr. Samrat Chatterjee of Pacific Northwest National Lab and et al, for their paper titled "Quantifying Mixed Uncertainties in Cyber Attacker Payoffs". Crossman and Liu won the highest award of Conference Best Paper, cited below:
"The Internet of Things or IoT promises to connect potentially anything and everything to the Internet, from home appliances to key components of the nation's critical infrastructure. Authentication or verifying the genuineness of connected devices is critical to establishing trust. This paper describes a laboratory test environment, including tools and workflows, for studying endpoint authentication in secured smart devices. The paper is well written and broadly accessible to a general technical audience. The test environment offers an affordable and convenient way to experiment with real attacks in a controlled environment to analyze the security of smart devices. The test environment also offers training and education opportunities for the future workforce."

An excerpt from one of the anonymous reviewers said:

"An excellent paper. This demonstrates that a paper can be informative and pleasant to read given the right topic. The test environment was described extremely well, and this paper could almost be used as a "how to" guide for colleges in the future. The figures were very helpful and placed flawlessly within the context of the paper so I did not have to stop and look for the right figure, and the figure always added something for me."

Matthew Crossman is an undergraduate student of Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Dartmouth, currently finishing his senior year and continuing on 4+1 Master Program in Computer Engineering in the fall with Prof. Hong Liu. He is a twice receipt of research grants, 2014 summer and 2014-2015 respectively, by the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) at UMass Dartmouth. His work is also sponsored by UMass President's Office for Cybersecurity Curriculum Initiation Funding 2014-2015.