ACADEMIA

The Office of Naval Research has announced second-year funding of more than $7 million for a national cybersecurity research center led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (NCASSR) was launched in 2003 with an initial grant of $5.7 million; its mission is to conduct research leading to the development of next-generation information security technologies. "The nation's security and economy are dependent on information and communications," said NCSA interim director Rob Pennington, the NCASSR project director. "Our research will contribute substantially to secure, reliable communications and intelligence-gathering tools, tools that are also sure to have applications in business, scientific exploration, and education." "Developing a secure cyberinfrastructure is vital to our nation's military forces and crisis response teams," said U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL. "Through its efforts and innovation, NCASSR will help ensure that America has the secure technological tools needed for intelligence gathering and crisis communication." "I believe America's investment in fundamental cybersecurity research will be rewarded as NCSA brings its significant expertise in networking, security, and data mining to bear on this important effort," said U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson, (IL-15). NCASSR is led by NCSA, with collaborating partners at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Battelle Pacific Northwest Division, InfoAssure Inc., the University of Tennessee, and the Naval Postgraduate School. In its second year, NCASSR will focus on five interrelated themes: • Cyberinformatics: NCASSR researchers will explore methods for the discovery of suspicious patterns and events from a wide variety of sensors and data sources. The goal is to develop a cybersecurity framework based on data mining and visualization approaches, with an emphasis on linkage analysis, outlier detection, multiple metaphor representations, and predictive modeling and for the system to be able to work with streaming, relational, text, and spatiotemporal data. • Security tools: Building on successes in this area from its first year, NCASSR will continue to develop software to provide security across many layers of a computer network -- including validating hardware integrity, secure operating systems, secure group communication key management, and secure multicast and wireless networks -- to provide end-to-end system security. • Sensors and software-defined radio (SDR): With substantial work already completed in year one, NCASSR will continue to explore issues related to the combination of sensors with software-defined radio, including efficient antenna designs for mobile sensors, organizing and authenticating groups of mobile sensors, and high-level application deployment. The focus will be on designing a low-cost SDR platform in which signal processing is handled by flexible software rather than rigid hardware. • SCADA protocol authentication program: SCADA refers to the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition systems that are used in key energy infrastructures, such as electric power grids and water pipelines. Research in this area will focus on developing secure mechanisms for authenticating valid control signals and data acquisition and for blocking unauthorized intrusions. • Secure Grid laboratory: This research will include projects centered on testbed development activities, including Simulated Anomalous Behavior and Recognition (SABRE), Programming and Testing Applications on Wireless Network of Sensors (PAWNS), MLS (Heterogeneous MultiLevel Secure) Network Testbed, Central Testbed (Network, Host, Grid Equipment), and the CyberCIEGE Extended Scenarios training activity . NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the State of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.