This seminar will start with a brief introduction to KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology, a unique international place for STEM research in Saudi Arabia located on the coast of the red sea, 80 kms north of Jeddah. Then we will present some of the ongoing research within the SERBER group (Security Research Bearing Experimental Results) led by Prof. Dacier. In particular, we will present the challenging and booming area of online gaming which we see as the new wild west for cybersecurity researchers. We will discuss new cheating techniques that can be carried out without violating the integrity of the client or server software, simply by manipulating packets on the network. We will show real world examples of these attacks carried out in practice and discuss possible mitigation strategies.
30/06/2025
When: Monday, June 30th at 14:00
Where: Room T1, building E, Viale Regina Elena 295
Marc Dacier is a full professor of Computer Science (CS) at King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology, Saudi Arabia. Dr. Dacier obtained his Ph.D. from INPT in 1994 from his work done at LAAS, CNRS, in Toulouse (France). Since then, he has had a balanced career between industry and academia. After his thesis, he worked for one year as a security consultant inParis, France, for France Telecom and the French ministry of interior. In 1996, he joined IBM Research in Zurich (Switzerland) to create the Global Security Analysis Laboratory (GSAL). In 2002, he became a professor at Eurecom. In2008, he joined Symantec to build its European Research Labs. Later, he spent two years in the USA to manage all the collaborative research projects, worldwide. In that role, he was in charge of teams in France, Ireland, and in the United States. He was also the university relationship manager for Symantec Research Labs, worldwide. In 2014, he became the director of the cybersecurity research group at QCRI, in Qatar, where he lived for 3 years. In October 2017, Dr. Dacier came back to EURECOM to become the head of the Digital Security department and a full professoruntil June 2021 when he joined KAUST. An internationally recognized expert in cybersecurity, Dr. Dacier has served on more than 120 program committees of all major security and dependability conferences and as a member of the editorial board of several top-tier technical peer-reviewed journals.