Are you a hacker? Programmer? Software developer? Coder? Many of us are. And, as intelligent humans, we tend to concentrate on the new and not try to reinvent the wheel, instead benefitting from what has been already created elsewhere. So we have more time to produce something new, something adapted to our needs, and leave the basics to software packages already produced somewhere else. Standing on the shoulders of other hackers, programmers, developers and coders worldwide, Gitlab at CERN, Github around the world and Stack Overflow, to name just three, provide a vast variety of libraries and code snippets for already existing functionalities. All you need to do is download or copy-paste them. But what if those hackers, programmers, developers and coders turn rogue?

Open source code is great, but does not come without risks. As anyone can write and share code, it is an inherent fact that some code comes with blatant security vulnerabilities. These are not necessarily introduced with malicious intent but the openness of the source code allows anyone to verify the integrity of the code and correct it if needed. However, sometimes even the open source community fails to identify major vulnerabilities like “Heartbleed”. So reusing public libraries comes with a risk. And this risk becomes more severe if malicious third parties intentionally tamper with software libraries and just wait for software developers “driving by”, downloading those malicious libraries and running that code in their software. Code executed and… boom! It would not be the first time that companies have been compromised through malicious libraries or modifications thereof. For example, a backdoor was discovered in the Python module named “ssh-decorator” distributed through “PyPi”, a repository of software for the Python programming language. Any SSH connection credentials were forwarded to a malicious party. Similarly, some malicious libraries have been named to resemble the name of a real, widely used library like, e.g. “crossenv”. But the fake one (“cross-env”) was extorting local environment variables and, potentially, also credentials. Thirty-nine more typo-squatted libraries were identified and deleted from “NCM”, a popular package manager for the JavaScript programming language. And then there are legacy libraries, not maintained by anyone any more, but still in use. In this example, the ownership was naively passed over to a malicious evil-doer who then introduced some malicious code in the otherwise clean library…

So automatic integration of external software libraries e.g. from PyPi or through NCM comes with a risk! Like with surfing the web, STOP – THINK – DON’T CLICK (or rather, don’t import). Only install software libraries from trusted sources. And even then, inspect the code either manually (cumbersome as it is) or run at least a static code analysis tool on top of that. The CERN Computer Security Team provides a variety of static code checkers for that purpose. Also consider using a centralised software repository manager like Sonatype Nexus or Apache Maven. The former is provided by CERN IT department and used for accelerator control system development and in the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

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Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

Do you often find yourself in situations where you would like to share documents with your colleagues, or need to ask people to provide you with documents? Given that many encryption solutions (in particular e-mail encryption) require a certain level of IT skills, such documents invariably end up being requested and sent via e-mail and are therefore unencrypted and hence visible to anyone, as the standard e-mail protocol does not come with any protection. Confidentiality rating: zero. This means only one thing: alternative communication channels are needed…

Rather than using e-mail, why not try CERN IT’s CERNbox service? It encrypts the transmission of documents during the sharing process, avoids the proliferation of copies by offering a single place to deposit a file, and allows revocation of access (useful for example in the case of erroneous attachments or recipients). Even better, for receiving documents it allows you to create a unique web address where anyone can deposit a file for you.

This means that it represents the perfect method to allow anyone to upload files intended to be shared with you in a secure and confidential manner. It is a “file drop” functionality where anyone can “drop” any kind of file into a dedicated folder, which is only accessible to you and to those whom you expressly grant access. Using a web browser, and a secured HTTPS connection, the communication is well encrypted using an established web standard. Via this method, files can easily be dropped from any Internet-connected device. All you need to do is to provide your external clients a unique web address (like https://cernbox.cern.ch/index.php/s/ LnBpPZvmsoFEEWi) where they can upload any file required. Once this is done, no one but you will be able to see it. Overwriting or deleting the information is also impossible.

So if you are working for a service which regularly requests documents from third parties or external collaborators, CERNBox is particularly useful as you can set up a unique web address which can be given to anyone. So, give it a go! Here is the recipe:

1.) Go to https://cernbox.cern.ch and log in;
2.) Create a new folder by left-clicking on the “+” symbol on the middle-top, select “Folder” and give it a name;
3.) Once created, Left-click the “<” (share icon) on the right-hand side of your folder: a menu will open up;
4.) Under “Sharing”, select “Public Links” and click on “Create public link”;
5.) Select “Upload only (File Drop)” and click on “Share” (you can also define a password and an expiration date, but please note that this is not recommended here);
6.) In the right-hand menu, you will then see an entry “File Drop” and below it a unique link/URL. This is the drop box folder you can now securely share with your peers for upload;
7.) Check the folder regularly to see newly uploaded files.

A detailed step-by-step guide can also be found here: https://cernbox-manual.web.cern.ch/cernbox-manual/en/sharing/share_a_folder.html#link-share-upload-only.

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Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

The Antiproton Decelerator (AD), sometimes known as the Antimatter Factory, is the world’s largest source of antimatter and has been operational since 2000. Here, antiprotons are slowed down and sent into the experiments, where they are combined with antielectrons to produce the most basic antiatom: that of antihydrogen. Over the course of the second long shutdown of CERN’s accelerator complex (LS2), the AD will receive several enhancements as well as repairs and refurbishments.

The recently installed ELENA ring, which was commissioned over 2017 and 2018, is designed to slow down even further the antiprotons decelerated by AD to ensure that the experiments can trap up to 100 times more antiprotons than they could without it. At the moment, ELENA is only connected to one of the experiments within the AD hall, the new GBAR experiment. The main work being done on the AD during the next two years is to extend the beam line from ELENA to all of the existing experiments and get ELENA fully operational. The lines that took the particles from the AD to the experiments have now been fully dismantled to prepare for the new injection lines from ELENA.

Other planned and ongoing activities involve the AD’s 84 magnets, which focus and steer the whizzing antiprotons along their racetrack. Most of these magnets were recycled from previous accelerator facilities and are much older than the AD itself. They are in need of repairs and refurbishment, which started during the previous long shutdown (LS1) and was pursued during subsequent year-end technical stops (YETS). So far, nine of the magnets have been treated, and 20 of them are scheduled for treatment during LS2. The remaining magnets will either be treated in situ or will undergo refurbishment during the next YETS and the third long shutdown (LS3).

Removing the magnets to take them to the treatment facility is no easy task. The AD ring is encased in a large shielding tunnel made of concrete blocks. Therefore, the blocks making up the ceiling near the magnet in question have to first be removed and stored, allowing a crane to descend though the opening and extract the magnet (which weighs up to 26 tonnes), sometimes with a margin of only 1 cm. Related work is being done to consolidate other elements of the AD, such as the kicker magnets, the septa magnets and the radiofrequency cavities.

One of the main tasks of LS2 that has already been achieved was the installation of a new cooling pump for the AD. Previously, a single set of pumps were operated, connected to both the AD itself and to its experiments. This meant that the pumping system was operational year round next to the AD ring, producing a constant noise at over 100 decibels in some places. The new dedicated pump allows the main pumping group to be turned off without affecting the experiments’ cooling systems, saving money and improving working conditions for those who need to be in close proximity to the AD over the shutdown period. It also provides much-needed redundancy to the cooling circuits.

By the end of LS2, the AD hall will look very different from what it does today, but the changes are not merely superficial. They will ensure that CERN’s antimatter factory continues to operate with high efficiency and help explore the mysteries surrounding elusive antimatter.

The World Wide Web is certainly the best-known innovation to have emerged from CERN, but it’s far from being the only one. That’s because fundamental research plays a vital role in the process of innovation. At an institution like CERN, innovation takes many forms: technological, of course, but also intellectual and social. Consider the latter. Ever since CERN was established, working across cultural boundaries has been the norm. That’s why people of over 100 nationalities can work harmoniously and peacefully here, and it’s why an inclusive working environment is so important.

Our Code of Conduct, the Diversity Office and the Ombud are just a few of the resources that serve to protect and promote diversity and inclusivity at CERN. Initiatives such as these belong every bit as much to the realm of innovation as the World Wide Web, and they’re intrinsic to the world of fundamental research.

Our international nature, along with scientists’ love of meritocracy and disdain for hierarchies, has led to the innovative management structures you see at CERN, particularly in the large experiments, and it has also fostered the culture of global collaboration in particle physics that is so rare in other walks of life. In which other field would rivals share innovative ideas with their competitors? In the 1950s, scientists from Brookhaven National Lab in the US did just that when they came up with a technique for increasing the energy of a particle accelerator and shared it with CERN. A decade later, it was the turn of the Europeans to lend a hand when the nascent National Accelerator Laboratory, now known as Fermilab, was building up its accelerator complex in the US. Such exchanges are common in fundamental research because it’s the goal that counts most. Today, you need look no further than CERN’s contribution to DUNE in the US, and the US contributions to the LHC, to see that this spirit of collaboration is alive and well.

Intellectual innovation is perhaps just another way of saying research. It’s something that we nurture at CERN through a wide range of training programmes to develop human capital. Intellectual innovation manifests itself in myriad ways, from some scientists devising new algorithms to refine their analyses, to others refusing to accept the answer “no”. When the tools don’t exist to tackle the research question at hand, scientists tend to develop them. To take an example from CERN, such perseverance has contributed much to medical applications over the decades.

The social and intellectual innovation that you find at CERN both contribute to technological innovation, and they helped to make CERN fertile ground for Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas thirty years ago. Then as now, CERN was a place at the cutting edge of technology. The Lab had the Internet, and many had computer workstations on their desks. The social structures at CERN allowed Berners-Lee to develop his ideas, and the culture of openness allowed CERN’s Management to make the Web available to all for free. It’s the same culture that allowed CERN to have a touchscreen-operated control system for the SPS in the 1970s, and to foster the development of technologies in fields ranging from aerospace to cultural heritage.

At CERN, it has always been like this. One important thing has changed, however, since the invention of the Web. We now have a formal Knowledge Transfer (KT) group at CERN, which has the task of identifying emerging technologies and ensuring that they not only serve the needs of research, but also go beyond the lab and into society as innovative solutions to contemporary problems.

When Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, few really understood where it would lead. Berners-Lee certainly had an idea – when he wrote the world’s first web browser in 1990, he named it “worldwideweb” – but to many of those around him, the early Web’s potential was not immediately obvious. Nevertheless, CERN allowed him to develop his vision, through a combination of his persistence and his supervisor’s recognition of a bright idea, but that was not until 18 months after the initial proposal was made. One can only speculate what might have happened had CERN had a KT group at the end of the 1980s. My feeling is that the end result would have been the same, but that we might just have got there faster. While it’s not the role of the researcher to recognise the potential of an innovation, that’s precisely the kind of expertise our KT group brings to CERN.

You could argue that the Web could have come from anywhere, and indeed the time was right for such an innovation, yet it’s no accident that it came from CERN. Few areas of human endeavour have an ecosystem that combines cutting-edge technology, intellectual rigour and a culture of openness to the same degree as fundamental research. That’s why places like CERN will always be at the heart of innovation.

Thirty years ago, an unimaginably powerful tool was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee here, at CERN. Initially conceived as a means to share scientific information, the Web grew into an essential technology for progress. Today, we are celebrating it with a globally webcast event. 

“The Web has been an incredible and powerful tool to reach out to the whole world, to break down barriers, to bring education and information to all and thus to reduce inequalities,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director General in her opening remarks.

Looking at the early days of the Web, a panel discussion titled “Let’s Share What We Know” recalled the stages Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal underwent before becoming the Web we know today. Frédéric Donck, Chief Regional Bureau Director for Europe for Internet Society, moderated the discussion between Berners-Lee, web pioneers Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff and Lou Montulli, and Zeynep Tufekci, techno-sociologist and writer.

A discussion between Bruno Giussani, Global Curator of the TED conferences, Chair of the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights and Sir Tim Berners-Lee addressed the dangerous paths the Web has taken since its birth and proposed ways to “fix” it, by bringing it back to its original democratic ideal, where each one can freely generate and access content, and keep ownership of their data. 

“Half of the world’s population is connected today, but we’ve got to step back and look at it, fight for Net Neutrality, free speech, privacy, and owning control of your own data. We should also make sure it doesn’t take another thirty years to get the other half of humanity connected,” said Berners-Lee. He then presented his plans to re-decentralise the Web with the Solid project for improved privacy and full data ownership, and also the Contract for the Web, targeted at governments, companies and citizens to ensure that the Web will serve humanity.

The event marked the launch of his thirty-hour journey from Geneva to London and then to Lagos, to retell the history of the Web and discuss its impact and its future. Before leaving, Berners-Lee received his original Web proposal sonified and on a format familiar to 1989: a walkman. Each hour of his journey will represent a year in the Web’s history and the World Wide Web Foundation invites each of the users to contribute to the crowdsourced Twitter timeline of the Web’s milestone moments.

The second panel discussion “Towards the Future” looked at where the Web is today and what paths it could take. Chaired by Bruno Giussani, the panel welcomed Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union, Jovan Kurbalija, Executive Director of the UN Secretary General High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, Monique Morrow, President and co-founder at the Humanized Internet and Zeynep Tufekci. Speakers explored how the evolution of technology influences our lives, ranging from users’ control over their identities and personal data to the ongoing movement to defend and save the Web. 

“Throughout the event, we learned about the challenges the Web faces today, and that arise from what makes the Web wonderful: its very openness,” pointed out Charlotte Warakaulle, Director of International Relations at CERN. “We learned that these issues, such as the ease with which the Web can be used for surveillance, either for commercial or political ends, are collective. The different perceptions of the internet in different parts of the world also present a challenge. It was a worrying conversation, but one that had an optimistic thread: there is growing recognition of the problems the Web faces, and a growing movement to solve them.”

The event also showcased the hackathon that took place at CERN, gathering developers and designers who recreated the first World Wide Web browser.

Find out more by following #web30 and by visiting the Web30 website.

More pictures of the event are available on CDS.

CERN’s research infrastructure requires a whole set of safety and environmental protection rules, in order to fulfil the safety policy of the Organization. With many facilities containing potentially combustible materials, one of the main safety concerns is fire. 

To assess the risks relating to fire and, in particular, to the release of radioactive substances as a consequence of fire, the CERN HSE unit has introduced the FIRIA (Fire-Induced Radiological Integrated Assessment) project, managed by the HSE Fire Safety Engineering team. FIRIA’s objective is to develop a general integrated risk assessment methodology and to use it for a number of CERN’s facilities. 

Moreover, a workshop titled "An engineering perspective on risk assessment: from theory to practice" was held at CERN in November 2018. The aim of the workshop was to share knowledge among risk assessment researchers and practitioners on different types of hazards and to raise awareness on this topic. The workshop included talks on quantitative risk analysis, risk acceptance criteria and uncertainty in risk assessment, as well as optimisation and cost-effectiveness of risk mitigation.

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Learn more about the risk assessment workshop here.
Learn more about the FIRIA project here. 

Strong traffic disruptions are expected between 13:00 and 18:00 on Friday 15 March during the March for climate in the following areas:

• Place des XXII-Cantons
• Mont Blanc Street
• Mont Blanc Bridge
• Rue du Rhône
• Low Streets
• Rue de la Corraterie
• Place-de-Neuve

Please comply with the signs posted and the instructions given by the police.

Thank you for your understanding.

You are encouraged to attend the conference on security at CERN, which has been postponed to: 

Thursday 21 March from 14h00 to 15h00
CERN Main Auditorium (500-1-001)
The talk will be given by Lluis Miralles, Head of SMB Department

CERN has established and implemented its security strategy to ensure the protection and safety of the personnel, the public, infrastructure and facilities against malicious acts. This is achieved through a combination of human, technical and organisational means designed to avert or reduce the risk of occurrence of such an act on the CERN premises.

CERN’s specific activities and geographical environment, its status as an international organisation and the worldwide security situation make the implementation of a security strategy very particular. In the talk, details on the practical deployment of the strategy and its results are presented.

CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group will be running the one day training session “Finding Happiness in Patent Information Databases” on 7 May 2019 at the CERN Training Centre.  Learn about the anatomy of patents and patent information databases and why it matters. 

• Description of the course:
• Brief introduction to knowledge transfer at CERN
• Fundamentals of intellectual property and patents
• Anatomy of a patent vs scientific publication
• Patent classification
• Introduction to publicly accessible patent information databases
• Searching public access patent information databases (Espacenet and Google Patents)
• Data analysis on patent information

If you are interested contact: Technical.management.training@cern.ch  or sign up directly in the CERN Training Catalogue:   http://tinyurl.com/y647673x

 This course is aimed at CERN personnel, but is also open to Users and Alumni.

The experiment caverns of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are staging a dazzling performance during Long Shutdown 2 (LS2). The resplendent sub-detectors, released from their underground homes, are performing a fascinating ballet. At the end of February, ALICE removed the two trackers, the inner tracker system and the time projection chamber, from the detector. At the very start of the long shutdown, on 3 December 2018, the teams began disconnecting the dozens of sub-detectors. And finally, on 25 February, the two trackers were ready to be removed.

The trackers are located around the collision points and are used to reconstruct the tracks of the particles produced in the collisions. The data they generate are essential for identifying the particles and understanding what happened during the collision. ALICE’s inner tracker is a 1.5-metre-long tube, 1 metre in diameter. It will be replaced with a new, much more precise detector closer to the collision point, formed of seven pixel layers and containing a total of 12.5 billion pixels. The current detector is still in the cavern and could spend its retirement as a museum piece in an exhibition above ground.

The time projection chamber is an imposing cylinder, measuring 5.1 metres in length and 5.6 metres in diameter, weighing an enormous 15 tonnes. The huge sub-detector was nonetheless hoisted out in just four hours, to be transferred to a building where it will undergo a complete metamorphosis. The current detector is based on multiwire proportional chamber technology. To increase the detector’s acquisition speed by a factor of 100, the readout system will be equipped with much faster components called gas electron multipliers (GEMs), and the electronics will be completely replaced.  The teams have started the renovation work, which should take around 11 months.

At present, the removal process is continuing in the cavern. Most of the calorimeters have been removed for refurbishment. Around 50 people are hard at work at the experiment.

Join us underground in the ALICE cavern for a Facebook Live event at 4 p.m. CET on Thursday, 21 March. Follow our experts on a tour right into the heart of the detector!

To find out more about the major work in progress at ALICE, see these articles on the website and in the CERN Courier.

See more images on CDS:

Light-by-light scattering is a very rare phenomenon in which two photons – particles of light – interact, producing another pair of photons. This process was among the earliest predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the quantum theory of electromagnetism, and is forbidden by classical physics theories (such as Maxwell’s theory of electrodynamics).

Direct evidence for light-by-light scattering at high energy had proven elusive for decades, until the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its second data-taking period (Run 2). Collisions of lead ions in the LHC provide a uniquely clean environment to study light-by-light scattering. Bunches of lead ions that are accelerated to very high energy are surrounded by an enormous flux of photons. When two lead ions pass close by each other at the centre of the ATLAS detector, but at a distance greater than twice the lead-ion radius, those photons can interact and scatter off one another without any further interaction between the lead ions, as the reach of the (much stronger) strong force is limited to the radius of a single proton. These interactions are known as ultra-peripheral collisions.

Yesterday, at the Rencontres de Moriond conference (La Thuile, Italy), the ATLAS collaboration reported the observation of light-by-light scattering with a significance of 8.2 standard deviations. The result uses data from the most recent heavy-ion run of the LHC, which took place in November 2018. This new measurement opens the door to further study of the light-by-light scattering process, which is not only interesting in itself as a manifestation of an extremely rare QED phenomenon, but may be sensitive to contributions from particles beyond the Standard Model. It paves the way for a new generation of searches for hypothetical light and neutral particles.

Read more on the ATLAS website.

Fixed-target experiments have a long history at CERN, forming essential building blocks in the physics landscape, in parallel to collider facilities. For 40 years, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) has provided a steady stream of high-energy proton beams to the North Area at the Prévessin site, feeding a wide variety of experiments. A symposium will be held at CERN to celebrate this hub of experiments, which have been exploring many fundamental questions and will continue to enrich the programme of the Laboratory.

North Area 40th anniversary celebration
Wednesday 3 April, 2.00 pm
Main Auditorium

Information and registration here. 

The LHCb collaboration at CERN¹ has seen, for the first time, the matter–antimatter asymmetry known as CP violation in a particle dubbed the D⁰ meson. The finding, presented today at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference and in a dedicated CERN seminar, is sure to make it into the textbooks of particle physics.

“The result is a milestone in the history of particle physics. Ever since the discovery of the D meson more than 40 years ago, particle physicists have suspected that CP violation also occurs in this system, but it was only now, using essentially the full data sample collected by the experiment, that the LHCb collaboration has finally been able to observe the effect,” said CERN Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen.

The term CP refers to the transformation that swaps a particle with the mirror image of its antiparticle. The weak interactions of the Standard Model of particle physics are known to induce a difference in the behaviour of some particles and of their CP counterparts, an asymmetry known as CP violation. The effect was first observed in the 1960s at Brookhaven Laboratory in the US in particles called neutral K mesons, which contain a “strange quark”, and, in 2001, experiments at the SLAC laboratory in the US and the KEK laboratory in Japan also observed the phenomenon in neutral B mesons, which contain a “bottom quark”. These findings led to the attribution of two Nobel prizes in physics, one in 1980 and another in 2008.

CP violation is an essential feature of our universe, necessary to induce the processes that, following the Big Bang, established the abundance of matter over antimatter that we observe in the present-day universe. The size of CP violation observed so far in Standard Model interactions, however, is too small to account for the present-day matter–antimatter imbalance, suggesting the existence of additional as-yet-unknown sources of CP violation.

The D⁰ meson is made of a charm quark and an up antiquark. So far, CP violation has only been observed in particles containing a strange or a bottom quark. These observations have confirmed the pattern of CP violation described in the Standard Model by the so-called Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) mixing matrix, which characterises how quarks of different types transform into each other via weak interactions. The deep origin of the CKM matrix, and the quest for additional sources and manifestations of CP violation, are among the big open questions of particle physics. The discovery of CP violation in the D⁰ meson is the first evidence of this asymmetry for the charm quark, adding new elements to the exploration of these questions.

To observe this CP asymmetry, the LHCb researchers used the full dataset delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to the LHCb experiment between 2011 and 2018 to look for decays of the D⁰ meson and its antiparticle, the anti-D⁰, into either kaons or pions. “Looking for these two decay products in our unprecedented sample of D⁰ particles gave us the required sensitivity to measure the tiny amount of CP violation expected for such decays. Measuring the extent of the violation then boiled down to counting the D⁰ and anti-D⁰ decays and taking the difference,” explained Giovanni Passaleva, spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration.

The result has a statistical significance of 5.3 standard deviations, exceeding the threshold of 5 standard deviations used by particle physicists to claim a discovery. This measurement will stimulate renewed theoretical work to assess its impact on the CKM description of CP violation built into the Standard Model, and will open the window to the search for possible new sources of CP violation using charmed particles.

Follow the webcast of the CERN seminar at 11.00 a.m. Geneva time.
For more information, see the LHCb website and the paper describing the results.

Footnote(s)

More than 150 participants attended the third edition of the CERN Alumni “Moving out of Academia to…” series which took place on Friday, 8 February and focused on industrial engineering. The participants were given the opportunity to interact with the panellists (all CERN Alumni) from diverse sectors within industry, ranging from watch-making, airport security and numerical simulation amongst others.

More information about this event is available here. 

A new head of the CERN Medical Service took office on 1 February. John Wijnberg took over from Véronique Fassnacht, who retired at the end of January.

Read more on CERN HSE’s website.

Today, CERN welcomes Serbia as its 23rd Member State, following receipt of formal notification from UNESCO that Serbia has acceded to the CERN¹ Convention.

“Investing in scientific research is important for the development of our economy and CERN is one of the most important scientific institutions today. I am immensely proud that Serbia has become a fully-fledged CERN Member State. This will bring new possibilities for our scientists and industry to work in cooperation with CERN and fellow CERN Member States,” said Ana Brnabić, Prime Minister of Serbia.

“Serbia has a longstanding relationship with CERN, with the continuous involvement of Serbian scientists in CERN’s major experiments. I’m very happy to see that Serbia’s initiative to seek membership status of CERN has now converged and that we can welcome Serbia as a Member State,” said Ursula Bassler, President of the CERN Council.

“It is a great pleasure to welcome Serbia as our 23rd Member State. The Serbian scientific community has made strong contributions to CERN’s projects for many years. Membership will strengthen the longstanding relationship between CERN and Serbia, creating opportunities for increased collaboration in scientific research, training, education, innovation and knowledge-sharing,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General.

“As a CERN Member State, Serbia is poised to further the development of science and education as our scientists, researchers, institutes and industry will be able to participate on the world stage in important scientific and technological decision-making,” said Mladen Šarčević, the Serbian Minister of Education, Science and Technological Development.

When Serbia was a part of Yugoslavia, which was one of the 12 founding Member States of CERN in 1954, Serbian physicists and engineers took part in some of CERN’s earliest projects, at the SC, PS and SPS facilities. In the 1980s and 1990s, physicists from Serbia worked on the DELPHI experiment at CERN’s LEP collider. In 2001, CERN and Serbia concluded an International Cooperation Agreement, leading to Serbia’s participation in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, as well as in the ACE and NA61 experiments. Serbia’s main involvement with CERN today is in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, in the ISOLDE facility, which carries out research ranging from nuclear physics to astrophysics, and on design studies for future particle colliders – FCC and CLIC– both of which are potentially new flagship projects at CERN.

As a CERN Member State, Serbia will have voting rights in the Council, CERN’s highest decision-making authority, and will contribute to the Organization’s budget. Membership will enhance the recruitment opportunities for Serbian nationals at CERN and for Serbian industry to bid for CERN contracts.

Footnote(s)

1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's leading laboratories for particle physics. The Organization is located on the French-Swiss border, with its headquarters in Geneva. Its Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Cyprus and Slovenia are Associate Member States in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Lithuania, Pakistan, Turkey and Ukraine are Associate Member States. The European Union, Japan, JINR, the Russian Federation, UNESCO and the United States of America currently have Observer status.

Have you ever heard about the “Broken Windows Theory”? It was introduced in 1982 by social scientists and suggests that serious crime and anti-social behaviour is more likely in environments where small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking and turnstile-jumping have already created an atmosphere of lawlessness. The city of New York adopted the theory, with the hope of reducing crime by creating a more positive urban environment, leading to order and lawfulness. We should try to apply the same theory to running computing services visible to the Internet.

Computing services at CERN are run by a large variety of people, but primarily by our colleagues from the IT department. On top of their service offerings, users can create web services with openings to the Internet. In parallel, our research community, the experiments and the accelerator sector independently run computing services, which themselves have openings to the Internet. While the Computer Security Team controls the openings in CERN’s outer perimeter firewall and performs an assessment on the level of security before any new opening is permitted, it is currently quite tiresome to maintain that security level for all open services. On the one hand, “computer security” is a highly dynamic subject and what was secure yesterday might become insecure tomorrow (think of the “Shellshocked” or “POODLE” vulnerabilities of the past). On the other hand, thanks to the motto “don’t touch a running system”, negligence leads to a deteriorated state of open services.

Recent computer security scans have shed some sinister light on those CERN computer services exposed to the Internet. Not all of them are perfectly secure anymore. Certificates have expired or are just “random” (e.g. self-signed or without chain-of-trust), encrypted channels use methods that are now deemed to be insecure, landing pages are missing or software is not up-to-date anymore. All owners of the affected services have, of course, been notified!

But still, like in New York, deteriorated services might attract malicious evil-doers to carry out their malicious deeds. Let’s keep our Internet presence secure and professional! Let’s apply New York City methods! We already scan for vulnerable websites and outdated configurations, we already check whether current firewall openings are still needed and we notify the owners of affected services, but we need to do more! On the one hand, we should look into adapting the defaults for centrally managed services in order to have an elevated and more secure base configuration. On the other hand, we would like to ask all owners of computing services, in particular where running that service is not your primary occupation, to keep a closer eye on them. Don’t let them deteriorate! Keep them up-to-date and verify regularly that all versions are the most recent ones. Check your certificates and renew them in time. Have a landing page or, if not possible, redirect to “home.cern”. And, finally, review all firewall openings and ask us to close them if they are not needed anymore. Hence, for 2019 and beyond, let’s keep our Digital Broken Windows under control.

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Do you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN? Follow our Monthly Report. For further information, questions or help, check our website or contact us at Computer.Security@cern.ch.

The major work to renovate the East Area of the Proton Synchrotron (PS), which began in 2018, will continue throughout LS2. This transformation of one of CERN’s oldest installations into a modern experiment area at the cutting edge of technology will take several years.

The civil engineering work, which mainly involves restoring the outer shell and roof of Building 157 (the East Area), should be completed within a few months. The building’s energy efficiency will be greatly improved, a prospect that won the SMB department and the project a major grant from the Office cantonal de l’énergie de Genève (OCEN).

But inside the building, the metamorphosis has only just begun. No fewer than 250 metres of beam lines supplying the CLOUD, CHARM and IRRAD experiments and the associated experiment areas must be renovated. “All the power converters, which use technology dating from the 1950s, will be replaced. The new converters, developed at CERN, will supply the magnets on a cyclical basis, with an energy recovery stage between each cycle. Electricity consumption should thereby fall from 11 GWh/year to around 0.6 GWh/year,” explains Sébastien Evrard, leader of the PS East Experiment Area renovation project. “As for the magnets, half of them will be renovated and the other half are currently being manufactured in several European countries.” Some 64 power converters and 60 magnets are concerned.

The beam lines will be arranged in a new configuration, with flexible optics, and new beam profile control monitors will be installed in order to carry out very precise measurements on the secondary beams. These scintillating fibre detectors have been developed at CERN by the Beam Instrumentation group to replace the less powerful delay wire chambers that were usually used in the past.

The renovation of the beam lines will begin in August with the installation of the new extraction line from the PS. By then, the experiment area will have been fully dismantled: more than 250 km of cables are yet to be extracted (50 km have already been removed), as well as 2000 tonnes of shielding blocks (of the 5000 tonnes present in the East Area).

This project, which is being steered by the EN/EA group, involves many other CERN groups from the EN, BE, TE, SMB, EP, HSE, IT, IPT and FAP departments, as well as external institutes, notably the University of Patras (Greece), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Russia) and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). “Sincere thanks are due to all the teams for their tremendous commitment!” says Sébastien Evrard.

The recommissioning of the East Area is planned for the end of 2020, with physics scheduled to start again in spring 2021. This historic experiment area has served physics for more than half a century and, thanks to the modernisation work under way, will continue to do so for many more years to come.

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For more information, see this article, published in June 2018.

As the Director-General recalled in her statement of 27 June 2016, as an intergovernmental organisation subject to its own treaty, CERN is not part of the European Union and Britain’s membership of CERN is not affected by Brexit. CERN’s Members of Personnel and their families have the right to reside in CERN’s Host States, whether citizens of the European Union or not. This remains the case regardless of the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

However, with the situation constantly evolving, the full impact on UK Members of Personnel and in particular their families is not yet clear.

The Host-State Relations Service, Legal Service and Human Resources Department have been working closely with the French and Swiss authorities to find solutions to issues as they arise, and will continue to do so as the situation evolves. A web page has been established by the Human Resources Department with links to general information, as well as to information provided by the governments of the UK, France and Switzerland.

For UK citizens resident in France, a particular focus of attention is the “Titre de Séjour Spécial” or “Carte de Séjour” for spouses and children, as well as the validity of driving licenses and the right to travel. For Switzerland, five bilateral agreements have been signed covering citizen’s rights, trade, insurance, road transport and air transport.

Information on the website will be updated regularly.