Developing User-Centric Security Mechanisms by Incorporating Entity Behavioral Traits

Title of the Talk:Developing User-Centric Security Mechanisms by Incorporating Entity Behavioral Traits
Speaker: Arun Balaji Buduru
Host Faculty: Dr.Saurabh Kumar
Date: April 10, 2025
Time: 10:00 am

Abstract: Cyber systems are increasingly being used ubiquitously to vastly improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs in critical areas, such as finance, transportation, defense, and healthcare. It is important to note that such wide spread use of devices for providing various services has resulted in generation of large amounts of rich user data which needs to be protected. Most existing cyber defense systems have two major issues: (1) they do not incorporate entity behavior(s) and preferences in their approaches, and (2) they do not continuously learn from dynamic environment and effectively adapt to thwart sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Consequently, the security solutions generated may not be usable or implementable by the user(s) thereby drastically reducing their effectiveness. In this talk we will explore three of our works, namely (1) Exploration of Speech Emotion Recognition PTMs for developing Cost-Effective Approach Towards Mitigating the Linguistic Bias in Speaker Verification Systems; (2) Explainable detection of Malware applications through Behavioral Analysis; and (3) Analyzing Linguistic effect on Audio Deepfake Detection through behavioral analysis.

Bio of the speaker:

Arun Balaji Buduru is currently heading the Usable Security Group @IIIT-Delhi and is an Associate Professor at Dept. of CSE and HCD in IIIT-Delhi. He is also a visiting faculty at Luddy school of Informatics in Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in Information Assurance, at Arizona State University in 2017. His research interests include Usable Security and Privacy, Entity Behavioral Modelling and Computational Linguistics. He received his B.E. degree in Computer Science in 2011 from Anna University at Chennai, India. He has worked as a research intern as part of Cisco IoT Architecture Group, San Jose. His Usable Security Group @IIIT-Delhi currently focuses on developing user-centric solutions for problems in the domains of Usable Security, deepfake detection, speech verification, adversarial learning, and malware behavioral analysis. He has published his research works in several prestigious journals and conferences such as Springer Scientific Reports, AAAI ICWSM, NAACL, INTERSPEECH, ICASSP, AAMAS, ACM HT, IEEE/ACM WI-IAT, ACM WebSci, IEEE QRS. He believes in developing efficient algorithms with learning-theoretic guarantees, whose effectiveness can be validated in practical settings. As a consequence, he actively engages with many governmental agencies and private companies such as DRDO, ISRO, IDS, NTRO, Delhi Police, CISCO, ABB, DCM Tech by taking up research projects for real-world deployment.