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Overview

Started in 2013 by Dr. Hsinchun Chen with $5.4M in funding from National Science Foundation (NSF), the AZSecure program's success garnered a renewal of the Scholarship-for-Service grant in 2019 in the amount of $3.6M. Grounded in Security Big Data Analytics, the cybersecurity research and education focus of the Artificial Intelligence Lab includes the original Hacker Web project and AZSecure Scholarship-for-Service (SFS) Fellowship. As a global society, we increasingly rely on a complex, fragile, and vulnerable cyberspace. The AI Lab’s focus on cybersecurity research and education is helping to address significant challenges facing the world through the understanding that achieving a truly secure cyberspace requires addressing both challenging scientific and engineering problems involving many components of the system, and the vulnerabilities that arise from human behaviors and choices. The graduate students involved in this research become assets to the cybersecurity workforce and those admitted to the competitive AZSecure SFS Fellowship program agree to begin their careers in the U.S. government. The Hacker Web project and the AZSecure SFS Fellowship program are integrated through student and faculty research and educational activities within the rich research environment of the AI Lab.

The AI Lab’s cybersecurity research and education focus builds upon the existing Management Information Systems program at the University of Arizona Eller College of Management (top-five ranked by U.S. News & World Report for over 28 consecutive years) and its highly successful Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (NSA/DHS CAE-IAE) program in information security and analytics. Information Security has been one of the MIS Department’s three “pillars of excellence” and additional educational opportunities are now available to students with the launch of a Masters in Cybersecurity in the summer of 2017 and the new cybersecurity course options that brings.

AZSecure SFS Fellowship

AZSecure SFS Fellowship: Students in this program are trained in advanced cybersecurity analytics and information assurance for placement in government agencies and industries. The funding for this program is through one of the largest NSF CyberCorps SFS:SaTC grant awards in the nation. The AZSecure SFS Fellowship Program is one of the few CyberCorps SFS programs awarded to a College of Management. The AZSecure program graduated 16 MS students between 2015 and 2017. An additional 10 MS and 2 Ph.D. students are enrolled as of the 2017/2018 academic year.

        AZSecure SFS Fellowship Program Overview

Details about the program for prospective and current students are available in the Master’s in MIS webspace.

Funding

We thank the following agencies and companies for providing research funding support:

• AZSecure: “Cybersecurity Scholarship-for-Service at The University of Arizona,”  PIs: H. Chen, S. Hariri (ECE), M. Patton (MIS), B. Zhang (MIS), S. Brown (MIS), DGE-1921485, NSF SFS Program, 8/01/2019-7/31/2024, $3.6M.
• AZSecure: “Cybersecurity Scholarship-for-Service at The University of Arizona,”  PIs: H. Chen, P. Goes (MIS), S. Hariri (ECE), M. Patton (MIS), DUE-1303362, NSF SFS Program, 9/15/2013-8/31/2018, $4.2M.

Publications

2020 |2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | Earlier work

2020

Conference Papers and Presentations

• M. Ebrahimi, S. Samtani, Y. Chai, and H. Chen, “Detecting Cyber Threats in Non-English Hacker Forums: An Adversarial Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Approach,” IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2020) Workshop on Deep Learning for Security (DLS), San Francisco, CA, May 21, 2020.

2019

Conference Papers and Presentations

• P. Du, M. Ebrahimi, N. Zhang, R. Brown, H. Chen, and S. Samtani, “Identifying High-Impact Opioid Products and Key Sellers in Dark Net Marketplaces: An Interpretable Text Analytics Approach,” Proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2019), ShenZeng, China, July 2019.
• N. Arnold, M. Ebrahimi, N. Zhang, B. Lazarine, S. Samtani, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Dark Net Ecosystem Cyber Threat Intelligence Tool,” Proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2019), ShenZeng, China, July 2019.
• B. Ampel, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Performance Modeling of Hyperledger  Sawtooth Blockchain,” Proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2019), ShenZeng, China, July 2019.

2018

Conference Papers and Presentations

• B. Ampel, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Performance Modeling of Hyperledger  Sawtooth Blockchain,” Proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2019), ShenZeng, China, July 2019.
• C. Harrell, S. Samtani, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Vulnerability Assessment, Remediation, and Automated Reporting: Case Studies of Higher Education Institutions,” Proceedings of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2018), Miami, Florida, November 2018.
• P. Du, N. Zhang, M. Ebrahimi, S. Samtani, B. Lazarine, N. SArnold, R. Dunn, S. Suntwal, G. Angeles, R. Schweitzer, and H. Chen, “Identifying, Collecting and Presenting Hacker Community Data: Forums, IRC, Carding Shops and DNMs,” Proceedings of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2018), Miami, Florida, November 2018.
• M. Ebrahimi, M. Surdeanu, S. Samtani, and H. Chen, “Detecting Cyber Threats in Non-English Dark Net Markets: A Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning Approach: An Exploratory Study,” Proceedings of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2018), Miami, Florida, November 2018.
• R. Williams, S. Samtani, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Incremental Hacker Forum Exploit Collection and Classification for Practical Cyber Threat Intelligence: An Exploratory Study,” Proceedings of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2018), Miami, Florida, November 2018.
• E. McMahon, M. Patton, H. Chen, and S. Samtani, “Benchmarking Vulnerability Assessment Tools for Enhanced Cyber-Physical Systems Resiliency,” Proceedings of 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI 2018), Miami, Florida, November 2018.

2017

Conference Papers and Presentations

• Emma McMahon, Ryan Williams, Malaka El, Sagar Samtani, Mark Patton and Hsinchun Chen, (2017). “Assessing Medical Device Vulnerabilities on the Internet of Things,” ISI 2017 Proceedings of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Beijing, China, July 2017. 10.1109/ISI.2017.8004903
• Ryan Williams, Emma McMahon, Sagar Samtani, Mark Patton and Hsinchun Chen, (2017). “Identifying Vulnerabilities of Consumer Internet of Things (IoT) Devices: A Scalable Approach,” ISI 2017 Proceedings of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Beijing, China, July 2017. 10.1109/ISI.2017.8004904
• John Grisham, Sagar Samtani, Mark Patton and Hsinchun Chen, (2017). “Identifying Mobile Malware and Key Threat Actors in Online Hacker Forums for Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence,” ISI 2017 Proceedings of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Beijing, China, July 2017. 10.1109/ISI.2017.8004867
• Malaka El, Sagar Samtani, Hsinchun Chen, Mark Patton and Emma McMahone, (2017). “Benchmarking Vulnerability Scanners: An Experiment on SCADA Devices and Scientific Instruments,” ISI 2017 Proceedings of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Beijing, China, July 2017. 10.1109/ISI.2017.8004879
• Rodney Rohrmann, Vincent Ercolani, Mark Patton, (2017). “Large Scale Port Scanning Through Tor Using Parallel Nmap Scans to Scan Large Portions of the IPv4 Range,” ISI 2017 Proceedings of 2017 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Beijing, China, July 2017. 10.1109/ISI.2017.8004906

Book Chapters

• Benjamin, V., Samtani, S., and Chen, H. (2017). "Conducting Large-Scale Analyses of Underground Hacker Communities." Cybercrime through an Interdisciplinary Lens.  Holt, Thomas H..  Routledge.  New York, NY.  DOI: 10.4324/9781315618456

2016 

Conference Papers and Presentations

• V. Ercolani, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Shodan Visualized,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745467
• J. Grisham, C. Barreras, C. Afarin, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Identifying Top Listers in Alphabay Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745477
• R. Jicha, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Identifying Devices across the IPv4 Address Space,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745469
• A. Jicha, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “SCADA Honeypots: An In-depth Analysis of Conpot,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745468
• R. Rohrmann, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Anonymous Port Scanning Performing Network -Reconnaissance Through Tor,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745475
• S. Samtani, and H. Chen, “Using Social Network Analysis to Identify Key Hackers for Keylogging Tools in Hacker Forums,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745500
• S. Samtani, K. Chinn, C. Larson, and H. Chen, “AZSecure Hacker Assets Portal: Cyber Threat Intelligence and Malware Analysis,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745437
• S. Samtani, S. Yu, H. Zhu, M. Patton, and H. Chen, “Identifying SCADA Vulnerabilities Using Passive and Active Vulnerability Assessment Techniques,” ISI 2016, Proceedings of 2016 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Tucson, Arizona, September 2016. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2016.7745438

2015

Conference Papers and Presentations

• S. Samtani, R. Chinn, and H. Chen, “Exploring Hacker Assets in Underground Forums,” ISI 2015, Proceedings of 2015 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Baltimore, Maryland, May 2015. DOI: 10.1109/ISI.2015.7165935

2014

Conference Papers and Presentations

• M. Patton, E. Gross, R. Chinn, S. Forbis, L. Walker, and H. Chen, “Uninvited Connections: A Study of the Vulnerable Devices on the Internet of Things (IoT),” ISI 2014, Proceedings of 2014 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, The Netherlands, September 2014. DOI: 10.1109/JISIC.2014.43