ACADEMIA

Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have been awarded a three-year grant of $400,000 from the National Science Foundation's Cyber Trust program to support the development of tools for computer and network security. "The computers and networks underlying national infrastructures, as well as in homes and offices, must be secure and reliable, even in the face of cyberattacks," said NCSA director Thom Dunning. "At NCSA, achieving that vision of a secure cyberinfrastructure is a significant focus of our research and development efforts." The explosive growth of the Internet has been accompanied by growing concerns about computer and network security. Fortunately, various computer and network logs provide information and opportunities to diagnose and prevent problems. Organizations could benefit from sharing their log information with one another, but are reluctant to release such sensitive data. The capability to anonymize log information would make information-sharing more secure and would allow organizations and individuals to collaborate comfortably. Current tools for log anonymization are primitive—they lack the ability to anonymize at different levels that correspond to the different degrees of trust between organizations. The anonymization process strips away some information that could be useful, so tradeoffs must be made between anonymization and security on the one hand and information and utility on the other. Therefore, log anonymization becomes an optimization problem: How can you achieve both utility and security? The goal of NCSA's project is to create an anonymization framework that allows users to customize anonymization, creating the optimal level of security and utility for their specific needs. NCSA staff tackling the project include security engineer Adam Slagell, Security Research Division visiting scholar Jun Wang, and senior systems security engineer William Yurcik.