Security and Safety for Emerging Technology on the Web

When: Friday, February 20, 2015
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Xinyu Xing, Georgia Institute of Technology

Host: Prof. Thamar Solorio

The existing and emerging web services such as personalized online experience and social networking have greatly facilitated and enhanced people’s lives. However, these innovations have also introduced many unexpected security and safety challenges not foreseen by service providers. Left untackled, these security and safety threats can result in serious consequences. In this talk, I will focus on two popular domains of web services, personalization services and fast-growing social networking services, where vulnerabilities in service components are overlooked or acute safety problems occur most frequently. First, I will decipher the personalization system and quantify personalization impact. Then, I will demonstrate that the existing typical personalized services can be exploited by pollution attacks to deliver contents intended by attackers. Finally, I will discuss my research endeavors in the field of social networking services. In particular, I will mention potential safety and security concerns on emerging social networking services -- video chat services, and discuss how I develop highly scalable and accurate solutions and systems that mitigate such threats to the end users by applying machine learning and data mining techniques to the problem domains. At the end of the talk, I will provide an overview of some of my other projects and give an outline for future work.

Bio:

Xinyu Xing is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are broadly in information security and privacy. Specifically, his work has focused on identifying, understanding, quantifying and mitigating unforeseen security and safety threats on web services. His work on safeguarding online video chat systems has been widely adopted by most online video chat services. Also, his research has been reported by news media including the New York Times, NewScientist, MIT Technology Review etc. He received his BS at Beihang University (BUAA) and MS at University of Colorado at Boulder, both in computer science.