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IBM Cyber Security Center of Excellence (CCoE)

Beer Sheva

in Collaboration with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Visiting Scientists and Interns

Collaboration Opportunities

We offer several opportunities for collaboration across our areas of activity. These include the following opportunities, among others:

  1. Graduate students of BGU, supervised by university and IBM researchers, participate in projects that often culminate in MSc and PhD theses.
  2. Internships are available for qualified international graduate students, in collaboration with the BGU Office of International Academic Affairs.
  3. A limited number of industrial projects are offered every year to undergraduate students as part of their (final year) university curriculum.

VR-supported Tools for Security Analysts

The security industry has introduced a great degree of automation with automatic processing and security analytics of big data. However, in most cases, human intervention is still required to fully understand the story behind complex, interrelated security events and make proper decisions about responding to security threats.

During the human analysis stage, highly detailed security information, often of complex multi-dimensional nature, must be conveyed to the analyst in an understandable manner. However, even with the most sophisticated data visualization tools on the market, there is still a painful gap between the precious intelligence embodied in security data and the insights analysts can extract from it. This gap prevents exploiting available data to the fullest extent possible.

Virtual Reality (VR) has been an active research area for a while, but only recently have major advances been made in both the quality and availability of this technology. It’s clear that VR methods provide additional visualization capabilities over traditional user interface tools. But they also provide much more intuitive responses to human input, well beyond that of normal computer screens.

We’re investigating how new VR techniques might be used to bridge the information gap described above and efficiently convey complex security information to the user. This new approach could provide data at a higher throughput and positively affect the quality of users’ decision making. Finding a way to exploit these new techniques to help users better grasp the data available in systems would be a significant step forward.


Contact ccoe.info@il.ibm.com for more information.

For more information, please contact us.

Prof. Yaron Wolfsthal, Associate Director, Head of Center

Visiting Scientists and Interns

Eden Yavin
Software and Information Systems Engineering Department, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Time of internship: 2020

Eden, an engineering student in Ben-Gurion University, enrolled in the Starship Internship Program, which provides students with an opportunity to learn about R&D processes in leading technology companies situated in the nearby Gav-Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park, where IBM’s CCoE is located. During the internship, Eden helped IBM researchers develop a network attack simulator. Following the successful completion of the internship project, Eden accepted a student position in IBM Research.

Dr. Nachiket Tapas
Department of Engineering, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

Time of internship: 2019-2020

Nachiket, a scholar from the University of Messina (UniMe) in Italy, carried out research in our lab in collaboration with Ben-Gurion University. The research, funded by the Italian government, focused on cross-organization sharing of cyber threats using blockchain technology. The research was carried out in collaboration with Prof. Asaf Shabtai (BGU), Prof. Francesco Longo (UniMe), Prof. Antonio Puliafito (UniMe), Dr. Yair Allouche (IBM), and Prof. Yaron Wolfsthal (IBM).

Trung Chu Bao
Department of Information Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Japan

Time of internship: Nov 2018-Jan 2019

Bao Trung is a doctoral student in Japan. He was funded by the Graduate Program for Real-World Data Circulation Leaders of Nagoya University to join an internship project in collaboration with IBM CCoE and BGU. He worked with Prof. Asaf Shabtai (BGU), Aviv Ron (IBM) and Prof. Yaron Wolfsthal (IBM) on utilizing AI techniques in log parsing.

Dr. Hagit Grushka-Cohen
Software and information System Engineering department, Ben Gurion University, Israel

Time of internship: 2018-2019

Hagit, as a recipient of the IBM PhD Student Award from Ben-Gurion University, investigated methods to automate the complex tasks of data security analysts, using advanced AI methods that leverage analyst knowledge and intuition as well as the history of system alerts. These methods enable organizations to discover security risks faster with less resources. Hagit's work was done in collaboration with Prof. Bracha Shapira (BGU), Prof. Lior Rokach (BGU), Dr. Ofer Biller (IBM), and Oded Sofer (IBM), and was published in a top research conference (PAKDD2020) and a book chapter.