Congratulations to Jonathan Shihao Ji’s student Kaiyang Li for their paper Neural Information Processing Systems being accepted at NeurIPS 2025 as a spotlight (~3% acceptance rate). NeurIPS is the top one conference in AI according to Google Scholar. Having a spotlight paper at NeurIPS is considered a big achievement in the AI community.
The Connecticut Advanced Computing Center (CACC) will host the annual CyberSEED event online on March 8th
Welcoming teams from dozens of colleges and universities, CyberSEED’25 will feature a capture the flag event designed specifically for students. The Connecticut Advanced Computing Center (CACC) is hosting the annual CyberSEED event on March 8. The event will take place online.
Register for the event by 9 a.m. on March 8.
The competition will touch on a variety of cybersecurity challenges including a set of flags focusing on reverse engineering, web application security, network traffic analysis, cryptography, and more. The competition requires a breadth of skills, as well as scripting and programming alongside a solid understanding of network monitoring and forensics tools.
Each top-placing team is eligible to win prizes in amounts ranging from $3,000 to $250.
During last year’s CyberSEED event, the UConn Cyber team, ERROR 404, placed second out of 165 teams.
In response to their achievement, the club’s president, Anthony Crisci, said “We beat colleges with way better cybersecurity funding, courses, and just generally better way better cybersecurity programs than UConn. It feels good and hopefully helps bring more attention to, in my opinion, one of, if not the most important area of technology.”
Laurent Michel is a computer science and engineering professor and organizes the CyberSEED event.
“CyberSEED is a wonderful opportunity for aspiring CyberSecurity Professionals and I’m thankful for Synchrony’s support throughout the years,” Michel says. “UConn’s own teams participated in CyberSEED’24 and the ‘ERROR-404’ teams distinguished itself by securing second place on the roster. I look forward to the outcome with this new group of students and wish them all the best in walking in the footsteps of the other Huskies who did so well. Go Huskies!”
The competition platform is provided by Cyber Skyline and the event is generously sponsored by Synchrony.
Event Details:
This event will be hosted online. Organizers will be using Zoom to coordinate and communicate with all teams during the event. During registration, students should complete the CyberSEED Liability Waiver and email completed forms. Students must register as a team, and should come prepared with a laptop.
Orientation will take place at 9:30 a.m., actual kick off will begin at 10:00 a.m.
The Secretary of State asked UConn's VoTeR Center to test multiple voting tabulators for reliability and evaluate which models are least prone to cyberattacks
This election year, UConn’s College of Engineering (CoE) is helping to ensure trust in every vote cast.
Last month, Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas announced 2,700 paper-based voting tabulators, statewide, will be replaced with new, state-of-the-art machines. The state hasn’t upgraded most voting equipment in almost 18 years.
“This is a pivotal moment for Connecticut’s elections, and one that is a long time in the making,” Thomas said in a recent press release. “Through this milestone tabulator upgrade, we’re providing our election administrators with the modern tools they need to run efficient elections.”
Since choosing the safest, most reliable tabulators was a crucial step in the replacement process, Thomas turned to the CoE’s Voting Technology Research (VoTeR) Center for guidance. Since 2006, members of the VoTeR Center have strived to assess the security and dependability of electronic voting equipment and develop new techniques for auditing the results of elections.
“For this evaluation, the VoTeR Center devised and executed testing procedures meant to assess the resilience of potential tabulators and the eco-system in which they operate against adversarial attacks,” explains Laurent Michel, technical director of the VoTeR Center and professor of computer science and engineering. “White-hat ethical hacking of this type is meant to find weaknesses in the equipment, or the processes election officials rely on to program, execute, and tabulate results state-wide.”
Over several weeks, the VoTeR team worked to evaluate potential new tabulators on the basis of cybersecurity guarantees, support for best-practice election audits, and compliance with the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines set by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. All findings inform officials as to the ideal safe-used processes that should be adopted to conduct elections with secure tabulators, Michel says.
Ultimately, the VoTeR team shared their evaluations with Thomas and the selection committee, and the State began purchasing the equipment. Secretary Thomas plans to distribute the new machines to nine Connecticut towns prior to the November general election. Other towns will receive theirs in 2025.
“Such an evaluation touches on many technical issues ranging from compliance to the standards to resilience to attacks an adversary might be tempted to carry out against a voting system, such as tampering with the equipment to coerce it into reporting incorrect results,” Michel says.
Michel, a founding member of the VoTeR Center, also serves as director of UConn’s Synchrony Financial Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity and co-director of the Connecticut Cybersecurity Center. At VoTeR, he works alongside Center Director Alexander Russell, professor of computer science and mathematics, Benjamin Fuller, associate professor of computer science, and several research software engineers, faculty, graduate, and undergraduate assistants. All three faculty teach in the CoE’s School of Computing.
“While directly supporting the State, the Center also pursues research in election integrity and auditing, with active involvement of undergraduates and graduate students,” Russell says.
The VoTer Center was formed in response to the Help America Vote Act, signed into law in 2002, and initially helped the State select the very tabulators that are currently at end of life. Since then, the purview of the center has significantly expanded, now supporting the State’s annual hand-counted audit procedures, providing forensic audits of electronic tabulators, developing technological tools for ballot processing and verification of voter assignments, and playing a critical role in the State’s efforts to guarantee voting rights.
“Proper auditing not only increases the confidence of the voters that state elections are run, but it also helps uncover procedural failings of the election process, enabling voting districts to better serve their constituents,” Michel says. “Our goals are to ensure the integrity of the election outcomes conducted with electronic voting systems and to continuously assess their security and dependability.”
View other reports, publications, and methodologies the Center relies on here.
The team will report on optimizing the standard for auditing election reporting, analyzing elections and their components, and specifying procedures for desired security.
UConn Engineering professors are aiding a national effort to maintain secure election infrastructure, ensuring fair elections for all United States voters.
School of Computing professors Benjamin Fuller, Laurent Michel, Ghada Almashaqbeh, and Alexander Russell partnered with the University of Nebraska at Omaha to launch the Secure, Holistic Infrastructure for Election Logistics and Data (SHIELD) project in October. The SHIELD project is supported by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center, a United States Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence.
The election system in the United States is historically complex, with local and state offices given decentralization and autonomy. The system offers oversight and independence to local and state offices. This decentralization yields increased cybersecurity resilience. However, the lack of sharing can result in duplication of efforts or a waste of limited resources.
This project will develop tools and processes that solidify the decentralized electoral systems in the United States to increase the trust of stakeholders in election outcomes. The research team will design a non-prescriptive formal process for election officials to reason holistically about the security of elections.
SHIELD has two main goals, including reporting on optimizing the standard for auditing election reporting, analyzing elections and their components, and specifying procedures for desired security; and organizing an Omaha forum on election security.
Fuller visited the University of Nebraska at Omaha early in October to attend an event hosted by NCITE, which brought Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and five Midwestern secretaries of state to discuss the challenges of the 2024 election and priorities for keeping it secure.
“By partnering with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, we can elevate our impact and continue to provide thoughtful models for election audits and secure systems,” Fuller says. “Boosting the public’s trust in the electoral process should be considered a key offering from a public institution like UConn.”
The four UConn researchers have experience in applied cryptography, cryptography, computer systems security, privacy, information theory, modeling and programming languages, combinatorial optimization, constraint programming, electronic voting security, and statistical election auditing.
This project is one of many UConn is leading related to election standards and national security.
“Our faculty in the School of Computing are recognized authorities in their respective domains, and they are profoundly dedicated to strengthening the integrity of electoral processes,” says School of Computing Director Sanguthevar Rajasekaran. “Their pioneering research on voting security and election standards plays a crucial role in fortifying the resilience and reliability of our democratic systems. I take great pride in working with such distinguished scholars committed to advancing this essential field of study.”
Read more about the SHIELD project online.
