St. Cloud State University Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity Dr. Akalanka Mailewa took three students, Anushka Hewarathna, Roger Massmann and Sharveen Paramiswaran, to the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS) 2023 conference in April.
The three SCSU students each represented their group papers that were accepted and published by MICS, which annually holds a regional conference dedicated to providing higher education participants an educational experience focused on sharing creative thinking about computer-related issues.
During the conference, Paramiswaran and his group-mate Chapin Johnson took home the award for “Best Paper” along with an award check for $450.
These three groups of students wrote their papers for a project initially assigned by Dr. Mailewa as a semester-long term paper for one of the Cybersecurity courses he teaches. Each year, after finishing grading, Dr. Mailewa selects the three best reports that he thinks are most likely to become published works. The three best reports that he selected this year were:
- “Discovering Vulnerabilities in Web Browser Extensions Contained by Google Chrome”
(Paramiswaran, Sharveen; Johnson, Chapin; Akalanka Mailewa)
- “Encryption Methods and Key Management Services for Secure Cloud Computing: Review”
(Moore, Tristan; Conlon, Samuel; Hewarathna, Anushka; Akalanka Mailewa)
- “Quantum Computing: An Assessment into the Impacts of Post-Quantum Cryptography”
(Massmann, Roger; Grantham, Nick; Akalanka Mailewa)
Dr. Mailewa then assisted these student groups in improving their formatting, editing, content and structuring to best suit appropriate conferences and journals. This is a process that Dr. Mailewa assists students with each year.
Paramiswaran and Johnson’s paper, “Discovering Vulnerabilities in Web Browser Extensions Contained by Google Chrome,” explores the potential risks that are involved in utilizing browser extensions for Google Chrome, a growing concern in a world where web browsers are used by almost everyone daily. The student authors researched and implemented a variety of different attacks to find where Chrome is susceptible to allowing malicious extensions. This research helps to demonstrate just how vulnerable the Google Chrome browser is. Future elaboration on this project would see the same attack vectors used on different web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Safari to see how different browsers are protected against these attacks.
