Safeguarding Young Minds: Cybersecurity, AI Menace & Privacy – Insights for Today’s Parents

    This presentation was delivered during a special post-lunch workshop for parents at DPS North Bengaluru, focusing on the digital risks faced by today’s children. Key topics included online safety, cybersecurity threats, the growing influence of AI (such as deepfakes and misinformation), and privacy challenges. The session aimed to empower parents with practical tools and strategies to help protect and guide their children in the digital space. This PPT provides insightful, action-oriented content to promote safer digital habits and responsible technology use among young minds.

Safeguarding Young Minds: Cybersecurity Insights for Today’s Parents by Anupam Tiwari on Scribd

Cargo Cult AI: Imitation Without Innovation in India’s Tech Hype

1. In the Pacific islands post-World War II, indigenous tribes watched in awe as planes landed with cargo—radios, food, medicine, and machinery. When the war ended and the cargo stopped, they built wooden airstrips, fake control towers, and mimicked the rituals of soldiers, hoping the cargo would return. This became known as the CARGO CULT—a powerful metaphor for mimicry without understanding.

2. Today, in India, a similar phenomenon is unfolding—Cargo Cult AI.

NO SARCASM: With headlines buzzing about AI breakthroughs, foundational models, custom chips, and sovereign AI ecosystems, India is echoing the global excitement. New “AI centers,” pilot projects, sandboxes, and GPT-wrapped APIs are springing up at record speed. The hope? That somehow, through mimicry and momentum, we too will “receive the cargo” —AI leadership, global recognition, and economic transformation.

But where is the core R&D?

• Where are our foundational models trained ground-up in India?
• Where are our indigenous GPU or TPU equivalents, our scalable frameworks, our long-range research labs?
• Without deep investment in original research, chip design, foundational architecture, and data infrastructure, we are building wooden runways and expecting jet engines to land.

Why This Matters?

    • Global AI powerhouses (US, China, even the EU) are investing billions into AI R&D, not just applications.

    • Leadership in AI isn’t about using models; it’s about building them—from math to silicon.

    • Dependence on imported models and hardware not only limits innovation but creates long-term strategic and economic risks.

The Call

• This isn’t a critique for the sake of cynicism. It’s a wake-up call.
• India has the talent. What it needs now is deep-tech policy, sovereign R&D ecosystems, academic-industry synergy, and patient capital focused not on quarterly demos but decade-long disruption.

Let’s move beyond the rituals.

Let’s build the runway and the airplane.

When Robots Eat Robots: The Cyber Risks Lurking in Metabolic Machines

1.    Imagine a warehouse where robots not only haul loads but can also “grow” by adding spare parts from their environment or even from other machines. Known as robot metabolism, this new frontier lets industrial bots self-assemble, heal, and adapt—blurring the line between machine and organism. But with revolutionary potential comes a new wave of cyber risks.

What’s Different About Metabolic Robots?

• Self-Growth: Robots can physically append or swap modules, “consuming” parts around them to boost strength or recover from damage.
  
  
• Autonomous Adaptation: Inspired by biology, these bots modify themselves with minimal human oversight for ultimate flexibility.

Cyber Risks: When Machine Metabolism Goes Rogue

• Unauthorized Expansion: Hackers could compromise robotic controls, forcing bots to append parts and grow uncontrollably—potentially damaging infrastructure or clogging workspaces.

• Malicious Reconfiguration: Attackers might manipulate growth or assembly instructions, causing robots to reconfigure dangerously or inefficiently.

• Escalated Resource Hoarding: Cyber-intruders could trigger robots to monopolize or “steal” modules needed by others, derailing the supply chain.

• Counterfeit Modules: Open modularity can let bad actors introduce tainted or insecure parts, infecting the robotic ecosystem from the inside.

• Loss of Human Control: These self-adaptive systems may act before humans can intervene, making real-time response challenging.

• Physical Safety Risks: Abnormal or malicious restructuring could endanger workers or other machines, creating liabilities never seen with traditional bots.

Mitigation Tactics for Robotic Metabolism

• Authenticate Every Module: Only allow trusted connections and hardware to physically integrate.

• Define “Growth Zones”: Use both code and physical barriers to restrict how and where bots can reconfigure.

• Real-Time Monitoring: Behavioral analytics should flag suspicious growth and alert supervisors instantly.

• Rapid-Response Controls: Deploy software and hardware kill-switches to halt compromised robots immediately.

• Simulate Attacks: Test systems in staging environments for cyber-physical exploits, so defenses are hardened before deployment.

Bottom Line

2.    The rise of metabolic robots promises factories and warehouses filled with living, adaptable machines. But if security lags behind innovation, these same machines could be hijacked to disrupt, destabilize, or even endanger critical supply operations. Securing metabolic robots isn’t just IT’s job—it’s a core operational necessity for the future of automation.

PQC-ENABLED AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS FOR SECURE SMART GRID INTEGRATION OF EVs

PQC-ENABLED AUTHENTICATION MECHANISMS FOR SECURE SMART GRID INTEGRATION OF EVs by Anupam Tiwari

The incorporation of Electric Vehicles into smart grid networks poses great cybersecurity threats, especially with respect to the secure authentication of devices and communications between charging stations, electric vehicles, and grid operators. Conventional cryptography methods like RSA and ECC are susceptible to quantum computing attacks, which call for the implementation of post-quantum cryptography in order to make these systems quantum- resistant. This paper discusses need and imminence of post- quantum cryptography-based authentication mechanisms for improving the security of smart grid infrastructure that facilitates Electric Vehicles operation and charging stations. It introduces the existing authentication protocols, their shortcomings from a quantum threat perspective, and suggests a framework using quantum-resistant algorithms for authenticating devices, exchanging keys, and ensuring data integrity. Moreover, we tackle scalability, efficiency, and standardization issues regarding the deployment of PQC-based solutions in large-scale smart grid settings. This research identifies the compelling need for secure, quantum-resistant authentication systems to protect the increasing overlap of electric vehicles and smart grid networks, with a view to maintaining secure, reliable, and future-proof energy infrastructures.