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To
movie buffs, the name Sybil may invoke
memories of a 1970s movie and a recent remake
about a woman who exhibited 16 different
personalities. Like its namesake, but taking
on a malevolent slant, a sybil attack in the
computing context is where a malicious user
assumes multiple fake identities to flood a
network of computers in order to squeeze out
honest users who would otherwise be able to
perform a wide scope of collaborative tasks
on the network. Various distributed systems,
including peer-to-peer systems such as
certain free-for-use file-sharing
applications, are vulnerable to sybil
attacks.
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It is for his ground-breaking work in fencing
off sybil attacks that Dr Yu Haifeng, an
Assistant Professor with the Department of
Computer Science in NUS School of Computing, was
honoured at this year’s inaugural President’s
Young Scientist Awards. He received the award at
a ceremony held at the Istana in the evening of
28 September 2009.
The citation for the award acknowledged Dr Yu’s
achievements in the field of distributed systems
security. It noted that his work has gained
international recognition, with his publications
garnering over 900 total citations, and being
used as course materials in universities
worldwide.
Sybil attacks have widely been considered
challenging, if not impossible, to defend
against. To contain the damage of sybil attacks,
Dr Yu has developed randomised algorithms for
limiting the corruptive influences of sybil
attacks with strong, provable and near-optimal
end guarantees. His work has won other awards,
including a Best Paper Award for his paper
titled “Secure and highly-available aggregation
queries in large-scale sensor networks via set
sampling” at the 8th ACM/IEEE International
Conference on Information Processing in Sensor
Networks held in April 2009 in San Francisco,
USA.
The President’s Young Scientist Awards were
presented as part of the President’s Science and
Technology Awards. They were previously known as
the National Young Scientist Awards and the
National Science and Technology Awards. A*Star,
the organisers of the awards, said the elevation
of the awards this year highlights and gives
recognition to the important role that research
scientists and engineers play in Singapore. Read
more about Dr Yu Haifeng and the President’s
Young Scientist Awards
here.
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