Research Themes
Critical Infrastructures & Homeland Defense
David Nicol, theme leader
Today's quality of life depends on the continuous functioning of many interdependent critical infrastructures, which depend in turn on the health of underlying computing networks and systems. Such infrastructures are at serious risk from both malicious cyber attacks and accidental failures. ITI researchers are addressing the challenge of how to design, build, and validate cyber infrastructures for critical and homeland defense applications.
ITI's Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for Power (TCIP) project is an excellent example of this work. Funded as a $7.5 million NSF Cyber Trust Center, TCIP will address trust issues in the next-generation power grid cyber infrastructure. TCIP is uniting ITI researchers with expertise in power systems, network security, and stochastic methods with key members of the power industry to create a more reliable and secure power grid for the future.
See the Critical Infrastructures & Homeland Defense theme page for more details.
Embedded & Enterprise Computing
Wen-mei Hwu, theme leader
To meet the needs of business, enterprise computing must be trustworthy. Providing trust is particularly challenging when multiple organizations share a computing infrastructure. Such a scenario can lead to many concerns involving access rights, virus infection, system crashes, and corporate espionage.
Building on UIUC's long history in advanced computer architectures and reliable and secure computing, ITI is designing and implementing Trusted ILLIAC, a cluster-based enterprise architecture that incorporates specialized hardware to efficiently and effectively implement trusted system algorithms. Based on a commodity Linux cluster, Trusted ILLIAC uses reconfigurable hardware, smart compilers capable of extracting and programming into hardware, application-specific reliability and security mechanisms, and a custom middleware to provide trustworthy application execution.
See the Embedded & Enterprise Computing theme page for more details.
Multimedia and Distributed Systems
Klara Nahrstedt, theme leader
From automobiles to microwave ovens, computer-based multimedia and distributed systems are spreading to every aspect of life. As software moves beyond the desktop, its secure, reliable, and correct operation is becoming far more important. Techniques that were once limited to mission-critical applications must now move to the mainstream.
ITI researchers are addressing issues involved in creating trustworthy multimedia and distributed systems for a wide variety of applications in four general areas.
The first class of projects considers multimedia services and protocol design and analysis by placing performance, reliability, and integrity checks to ensure that distributed multimedia protocols' trustworthiness is enforced in terms of security, availability, timeliness, and dependability.
The second class of projects aims to secure multimedia content that will be distributed in multimedia and distributed environments.
The third class of projects studies human-computer interfaces and social aspects of pervasive devices and environments that are so important in multimedia and distributed environments.
Finally, the fourth class of projects addresses theoretical and design issues for modeling, assessing, benchmarking, and implementing survivable distributed systems that can tolerate the unexpected and continue to operate.
See the Multimedia and Distributed Systems theme page for more details.