Cybersecurity leaders convene at UB for daylong conference

Nearly 100 cybersecurity experts converged upon UB Friday to share the field’s latest advancements and discuss the future.

The daylong conference, dubbed Great Lakes Security Day 2019, brought together leaders from UB and other New York institutions of higher education, including the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the University of Rochester and Syracuse University.

Additional participants came from The College of William and Mary, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Information Systems Security Association.

Discussions centered on everything from using the echo within someone’s ear canal as a means to authenticate a wearable device to the most effective way to stop people from reusing the same password on multiple websites.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are a corporation, nonprofit, the government, or just a casual internet user, protecting digital information today is more important than ever,” said conference organizer Marina Blanton, associate professor of computer science and engineering in UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“Great Lakes Security Day brings together scientists and engineers who are on the leading edge of cybersecurity. It’s a forum to share ideas, discuss research collaborations and keep up with the latest advancements in the field,” she said.

Opening remarks were delivered by Venu Govindaraju, vice president for research and economic development at UB, and the keynote speaker was Michael Reiter, Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The conference, which was held at The Center for Tomorrow, was also attended by students and industry members.

In addition to Blanton, program chairs of the conference included Ziming Zhao of RIT and John Criswell of University of Rochester. On the organizing committee was Blanton, Shambhu Upadhyaya, professor of computer science and engineering at UB, and Michelle Neumaier, staff assistant at UB.