Research
Research and Academic Initiatives in Cyber Security at Babeș-Bolyai University
Attila Mester - Phd student @ Babes-Bolyai University
Darius Bufnea - Lecturer Professor @ Babes-Bolyai University
Europa Room
9th November, 17:00-17:30
Over the last few years, academia in Romania started to pay a special attention to cyber security training programmes, and Babeș-Bolyai University could not be an exception. Although underestimated by the society, the dangers induced by cyber threats are ever greater given the increasing digitalization or the current geopolitical context. We present the academic initiatives of Babeș-Bolyai University in the field of cyber security and how we try to organically grow it in the university. Next, one of the research topics addressed by a doctoral thesis elaborated within the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science is presented. Hundreds of thousands of malicious samples are discovered globally on a daily basis, justifying the need of automating their analysis. We present a static call graph-based analysis method, and its applications in fingerprint extraction using locality-sensitive hashing of instruction n-gram distribution, clustering using classical community detection algorithms, and classification using graph convolutional neural networks. These applications contribute to the identification of APTs – a problem also referred to as attribution in this domain.
Attila Mester
Babes-Bolyai University
I am a Phd student at Babes-Bolyai University (scientific supervisor: dr. Anca Andreica), and technical lead at Cyber Threat Intelligence Lab, Bitdefender, Cluj-Napoca. My Phd study focuses on analysis of malware samples, offering new approaches in their clustering and classification. Our latest results with my supervisor and mentor, dr. Zalán Bodó, include the classification of several thousand samples in over 200 malware families. Giving kudos to my favourite gym, where a large proportion of the ideas were and will be born.
Darius Bufnea
Babes-Bolyai University
Darius Bufnea is a lecturer at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania. He received the Ph.D. degree from Babeș-Bolyai University in 2008. He was the director of one research grant funded by the Romanian funding agency and a member of another six. He has authored over 40 research papers on networking, congestion control, information retrieval, parallel computing, and web technologies. He is the coauthor of four books that cover different computer science related topics. His current focus and interest is on cybersecurity, leading several cyber security related educational programs at UBB.
