Professor Bharat Bhargava is conducting research in security issues in mobile and ad hoc networks. This involves host authentication and key management, secure routing and dealing with malicious hosts, adaptability to attacks, and experimental studies. Related research is in formalizing evidence, trust, and fraud. Applications in e-commerce and transportation security are being tested in a prototype system. He has proposed schemes to identify vulnerabilities in systems and networks, and assess threats to large organizations. He has developed techniques to avoid threats that can lead to operational failures. The research has direct impact on nuclear waste transport, bio-security, disaster management, and homeland security. These ideas and scientific principles are being applied to the building of peer-to-peer systems, cellular-assisted mobile ad hoc networks, and to the monitoring of QoS-enabled network domains.
His research group consists of nine PhD students and two postdocs. Seed grants supported by CERIAS have led to six NSF grants active concurrently. In addition, DARPA, IBM, and CISCO have provided contracts and gift funds.
Professor Bhargava was the chairman of the IEEE Symposium on Reliable and Distributed Systems held at Purdue in October 1998. Professor Bhargava is on the editorial board of three international journals. In the 1988 IEEE Data Engineering Conference, he and John Riedl received the award for best paper for their work on "A Model for Adaptable Systems for Transaction Processing." Professor Bhargava is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers. He has been awarded the charter Gold Core Member distinction by the IEEE Computer Society for his distinguished service. He received Outstanding Instructor Awards from the Purdue chapter of the ACM in 1996 and 1998. In 1999 he received IEEE Technical Achievement award for a major impact of his decade long contributions to foundations of adaptability in communication and distributed systems.
The RAID laboratory at Purdue University has facilities to conduct both theoretical and experimental studies in networking. They include network communication measurement experiments, analysis of communication infrastructure, adaptability experiments for distributed systems, and peer-to-peer systems. Experimental studies involve a variety of subjects in security: secure routing and intruder identification in mobile ad hoc networks, authentication and key management in mobile systems, trust assessment and prediction, monitoring network domains to detect service violations and DoS attacks, and vulnerabilities and attacker behaviors.
The laboratory has a network of workstations running the RAID distributed system. In addition, mini-RAID, a variety of communication libraries and enhancements to the network simulator ns2, the WANCE tool, and ADNET are available.
Abstracts of funded proposals, full research papers, information about students, and the RAID laboratory are available at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/bb.
