National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (NCASSR)
Von Welch and Randy Butler, Directors
NCSA/University of Illinois, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Naval Postgraduate School
As a nation, we are increasingly dependent on CyberInfrastructure (CI) to manage such things as the electrical grid, traffic signals, emergency systems, and communications. Distributed systems have been around for a long time, and what we know as CI today is the emergence and integration of these different systems into a more unified metasystem. These integrated distributed systems have created complex dependencies and trust inheritance with numerous security unknowns and vulnerabilities. Such complex, highly integrated systems resist traditional security methodologies, making it difficult to tell where one system ends and another begins.
The National Center for Applied Secure Systems Research (NCASSR) is focused on building and applying advanced security solutions for today's Cyberinfrastructure needs. NCASSR research and development spans security technologies, including data collection and management, collaborative systems, secure communications, federations and virtual organizations, Grids, and data analytics. NCASSR is strongly applied and focused on solving real-world problems that hinder the development and deployment of secure CI.
NCASSR is funded by the Office of Naval Research and is led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). NCASSR capitalizes on NCSA's rich high-performance computational experiences and resources, leveraging those strengths in cooperation with complementary research groups at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Naval Postgraduate School , and the UIUC Department of Computer Science. Within ITI, NCASSR is the leader in the areas of technology integration and the deployment of novel security systems and approaches that prototype future science and engineering research environments.
Current projects include:
- An Infrastructure for Emergency Communications
- CyberTerrorism/Crime Investigation Framework
- Cybersecurity Performance Analysis Capability
- Detection and Apprehension of Rare Events in Data Streams
- Lightweight Formal Methods for Software Security Testing Automation
- System Administrator Simulation Trainer (SAST)
Please see the separate NCASSR home page for further details.