Cyberattacks topic of Science on Tap on Thursday (Aug. 31)

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University computer science professor Mathias Payer will examine the way cyberattacks are portrayed in Hollywood, how they really happen and what you can do to protect yourself during this week's Science on Tap.

Mathias will give a talk titled, "Hackers, exploits, and how we defend against them – a cybersecurity tale” at 6 p.m. Thursday (August 31) on the top floor of Lafayette Brewing Company, 622 Main St., Lafayette. The informal lecture is free and open to those 21 and older.

In movies, hackers skillfully bypass security systems and firewalls with ease and hacks are portrayed as a flashy countdown. Payer describes this as the “CSI effect.”

“On film, security problems are oversimplified and hackers can crack any code in seconds,” he said. “Hacks must be quick and look spectacular on screen while in the real world, there is much more preparation required, including hours staring at a debugger and figuring out how the program ‘ticks’ internally.”

Software systems are attacked by exploiting their vulnerabilities. Because the systems are so complex, any reasonably sized application will contain at least some coding errors. Some of these errors can be triggered by an attacker, becoming vulnerabilities, which are then used to steal private data, access a video camera or encrypt a hard drive.  

But not all hackers are bad, says Payer. Hacking on its own is a skill that involves analyzing computer programs for vulnerabilities, which can be used for good.

Payer is a security researcher and leader of the HexHive group at Purdue. His research focuses on protecting applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption. His interests include system security, binary exploitation, user-space software-based fault isolation, binary translation and recompilation, and virtualization. 

He graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich with a doctorate degree in 2012 and then spent two years as a postdoc in Dawn Song’s BitBlaze group at the University of California, Berkeley. Payer joined Purdue’s faculty in 2014 and founded the b01lers Purdue CTF team.

Science on Tap, now led by graduate students Andrew Hesselbrock, Paula Cooper, Elizabeth Phillips and Carolina Vivas Valencia, provides Purdue faculty and collaborating researchers the opportunity to share research activities in an informal setting with presentations designed to appeal to a more general audience. Attendance at the event has averaged 80 during the program's first five years. 

Writer: Kayla Zacharias, 765-494-9318, kzachar@purdue.edu

Source: Mathias Payer, 765-494-6010, mpayer@purdue.edu