Carnegie Mellon Lab Tackles Cyber-Security

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1361399,00.asp

By Dennis Fisher 
October 22, 2003

Security, engineering and public policy experts at Carnegie Mellon
University are joining together to form a new lab at the school
dedicated to researching and developing new security technologies.

The new organization, known as the Carnegie Mellon CyLab, will include
representatives from the school's engineering, computer science and
public policy departments, as well as personnel from the CERT
Coordination Center, also based at the university. The new group will
seek to promote collaboration between the government and the private
sector, something that has been sorely lacking when it comes to
information security.

CyLab's charter will differ significantly from that of CERT, which is
charged with analyzing and responding to security threats and attacks.  
A quasi-public organization, CERT is partially funded by the federal
government. CyLab will also receive public money, but will concentrate
on finding long-term solutions to pervasive security problems instead
of looking at how to mitigate the latest attack on Internet Explorer,
as CERT does.

CyLab already includes 30 staff members, 30 faculty and 80 students,
comprising what Carnegie Mellon officials say is the largest academic
security research organization in the country.

The group's mission is essentially threefold: education; research and
development; and response and prediction. In addition to offering
bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in security-related
disciplines, CyLab will also work to educate home users on the
inherent dangers of the Internet and the steps they can take to combat
those issues.

"Our goal is to empower 10 million citizens with security wellness. If
we can give them some very basic information about firewalls and
anti-virus, it could significantly slow down the velocity of attacks,"  
said Pradeep Khosla, co-director of CyLab and head of the Electrical
and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon, based in
Pittsburgh.

The meat of CyLab's work will be its R&D operation. The lab's research
will be funded partially by industry, with the goal of getting new
technology to market as quickly as possible. Companies that provide
high levels of funding will have rights to the intellectual property
the lab develops. The group already has signed on 50 companies as
funding partners, including Microsoft Corp., General Motors Corp.,
Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp.

"The technology has to have a fast track to the marketplace through
industry," Khosla said. "In the security business, we can't deal with
local politics. We're concerned with the security of the country."

Among the projects that CyLab researchers are already working on are a
multi-modal biometric authentication system capable of using a
combination of voice prints, fingerprints and other biometrics to
authenticate users. There is also a team looking at a way to tag IP
packets so that they can be traced back to the machine that generated
them. This would have broad applications in the security world,
especially in identifying the people behind distributed
denial-of-service attacks and other crimes in which attackers spoof
the IP addresses on packets to cover their tracks.

Khosla envisions a system in which users, who have positively
authenticated on a PC via the advanced biometric technology, can be
proved to be responsible for an attack via the packet-tracing
function. The group hopes to have some of this technology in the hands
of vendors within 12 months, Khosla said.



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