Baldwin’s Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking Class Strikes Again

Students in Dr. Thomas Heverin's Cybersecurity and Ethical Hacking class have achieved a major milestone — their research has been accepted for presentation at the 2025 International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (ICCWS). This recognition highlights their outstanding work in cybersecurity research.

 

The paper, "SPARK: Exposing Vulnerabilities in Collaborative Display Systems and Session-Key Exposure," investigates security flaws in Solstice Pods, wireless collaboration devices commonly used at universities. Analyzing 81 publicly exposed devices across 22 universities, students identified critical vulnerabilities that could allow unauthorized access to live session keys.

 

To support their research, they developed SPARK (Solstice Pod Access Retrieval Key), a Python tool that successfully retrieved session keys in 13 cases across nine universities. Their findings demonstrated that devices using self-signed certificates were significantly more secure than those with non-self-signed certificates, highlighting key security risks in academic environments.

 

This achievement showcases Baldwin students’ technical expertise and their impact on the broader cybersecurity community. Congratulations to the Baldwin Ethical Hackers for this prestigious recognition! The authors include: Emme Darlington ’27, Amy Fei ’27, Isabelle Feigenberg ’25, Marissa Gist ’26, Sana Goyal ’25, Sabine Kim ’25, Nikoletta Kuvaeva ’25, Audrey Lawler ’25, Hanne Li ’27, Claire Lu ’26, Yoyo Lu ’27, Laura Messamore ’26, Rachel Mirin’25, Stella Mrockowski ’27, Hanna Shevade ’27, Whitney Shissler ’27, Olivia Stankiewicz-Goldsmith ’25, Kyla Walker ’27, Ruby Zeng ’27 and Dr. Thomas Heverin.

 

The Baldwin Ethical Hackers logo was created by Sabine Kim ’25, with input from the entire ethical hacking class.