CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

About CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

CERIAS -- the Nation's top-ranked interdisciplinary academic education and research institute -- hosts a weekly cyber security, privacy, resiliency or autonomy speaker, highlighting technical discovery, a case studies or exploring cyber operational approaches; they are not product demonstrations, service sales pitches, or company recruitment presentations. Join us weekly...or explore 25 years of archives for the who's-who in cybersecurity.

Publisher

CERIAS <webmaster@cerias.purdue.edu>

Category

business · education · education · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Jan 2000

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

644 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Eugene Spafford, AI: Cybersecurity Panacea or Existential Threat?

   Twenty years ago, the first post on the CERIAS blog took apart the rule that passwords must be changed every month. NIST retired the practice in 2017; some standards still require it. That is how a security myth works: a plausible claim, repeated in enough checklists, becomes infrastructure, and nobody audits infrastructure that seems to be working. The newest myth is that AI makes security professionals optional. This talk separates the three claims that marketing bundles together. AI tools do find flaws in shipped code, and the evidence from Google, DARPA, Mozilla, and Microsoft is real. Autonomous agents do add kinds of risk that no deployed security architecture was designed for. Neither fact implies that fewer people are needed. The vulnerability flood of 2026 is an audit of forty years of deferred engineering, not a crisis AI created, and the bottleneck has moved to the human capacity to verify, coordinate, and fix. The organizations that bet on replacement are already rehiring, often at a premium, the judgment they discarded. Open positions in the field number in the hundreds of thousands. For students, the message is direct: AI is not replacing you; it is generating your workload. The talk closes with what grows, what shrinks, and  how to prepare. The capacities that make you a professional are the ones that do not become obsolete with the next model release. About the speaker: Eugene H. Spafford is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University and the founder and Executive Director Emeritus of CERIAS. He is co-author of*Cybersecurity Myths and Misconceptions *(Addison-Wesley, 2023).

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Krassimir Tzvetanov, Trading Privacy for Convenience: Leading through example in a Hyper-Connected Era

   In contemporary digital environments, individuals increasingly exchange personal privacy for the convenience afforded by online services, often without full awareness of the breadth or implications of this trade-off. This study examines this phenomenon through a comparative analysis of the data practices of major communication, social networking, and dating applications, including Meta, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google,WeChat, Signal, Telegram, Snapchat, and others. By systematically reviewing privacy policies and related disclosures, the research evaluates how these platforms collect, process, and utilize a wide range of user data, encompassing identifiers such as IP address, location information, demographic attributes,behavioral telemetry, device metadata, and access to sensitive content. The analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity in data collection practices - both in terms of scope and transparency - across different categories of applications and geopolitical ecosystems. Notably,privacy-oriented services such as Signal demonstrate markedly reduced data gathering compared to mainstream or commercially driven platforms. An illustrative comparison between high-privacy and low-privacy application models highlights the extent to which features that enhance user convenience,including personalization algorithms and streamlined authentication, are frequently enabled by extensive behavioral tracking. The findings underscore the imperative for security professionals to advocate for stronger privacy standards, promote informed consent, and encourage data-minimizing design principles. Ultimately, the study argues that safeguarding privacy is not solely a technical undertaking but also a cultural and ethical responsibility requiring leadership within the securitycommunity. About the speaker: Dr. Tzvetanov has served as a Graduate Researcher at Purdue University for the past six years, focusing on Homeland Security, Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), and Influence Operations. Concurrently, he has served as Instructor of Record for graduate-level courses in Cybersecurity and Homeland Security.For the past three years, Dr. Tzvetanov has also served as CISO and Director of Security Engineering at Hydrolix. Prior to this role, he held positions including CTI Lead, Principal Security Engineer and Architect,and Red Team Operator at major technology companies such as Cisco, Yahoo!, and Google. Throughout his career, he has authored training materials, whitepapers, and academic publications covering distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)attack mitigation and investigation, cyber threat intelligence, privacy, and influence operations. He has also contributed to numerous law enforcement investigations, including providing expert witness testimony in federal court.Dr. Tzvetanov is an active contributor to the global cybersecurity research and incident response communities. He has served on program committees for ShmooCon, FIRST, NANOG, BayThreat, and the Underground Economy. He is an active participant in several Special Interest Groups within the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), has contributed to the Honeynet Project, and was a principal organizer of the Bay Threat security conference. He also led the Radio Communications Department at DEF CON.Dr. Tzvetanov holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Technology, both with a concentration in Homeland Security; an M.S. in Digital Forensics and Investigations; and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Radio Communications.

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   Jingjie Li, Advancing Online Safety Governance for Digital Platforms and Communities

   Internet users increasingly interact through emerging digital platforms and communities, which create complex online safety, security and privacy challenges that aredifficult to navigate. This talk will present insights from our research to understand the rising online safety landscape and improve online safety governance. I will first present our work characterizing online community responses to globalized scam-driven human trafficking, which received a Best Paper Award at ACM CHI 2026. Scam-driven cross-border human trafficking has become a long-standing societal crisis in Asia. Through our analysis of community responses on RedNote, a major Chinese social media platform, we identify several key challenges, including cultural values that can both enable trafficking and hinder survivors' recovery. Although online communities develop and share protective strategies, these efforts are complicated by uncertainty about the reliability of available support and difficulties in cross-border coordination. I will discuss the implications of these findings for prevention, platform governance, and international cooperation against scam-driven trafficking. Building on this work, I will then highlight opportunities for more proactive approaches to governing digital platforms and online communities, drawing on insights from our parallel research efforts. Finally, I will reflect on methodological lessons from our research and motivate discussion about future opportunities for studying and improving online safety, security and privacy in emerging digital environments. About the speaker: Jingjie Li is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. His work spans privacy, security, and online safety,with the goal of seamlessly integrating these principles into emerging human-centered technologies such as smart homes, augmented and virtual reality, and AI-enabled systems. He published impactful work at premier conferences in security and privacy (IEEE S&amp;P, USENIX Security, and ACM CCS), human-computer interaction (ACM CHI and ACM CSCW), and computer systems (IEEE/ACM ISCA, IEEE TMC and IEEE TVLSI). His interdisciplinary work received multiple best paper awards and has informed industry development and policymaking with key stakeholders across countries. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Jingjie obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023. For more information, please visit his homepage: www.jingjieli.me

Who has been a guest on CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Paul Vixie
• Tristen Mullins
• Dr Richard Love
• Josiah Dykstra
• Michael Clothier

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

206,480

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.1 / 5

7 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 64 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

61

Social presence

0

YouTube

86

Engagement

82