The Biometrics Standards, Performance, and Assurance Laboratory, housed in the Department of Industrial Technology, is a cross-disciplinary laboratory that encourages applied research in the field of biometric technologies. The mission of the BSPA laboratory is to excel in the applied research of biometric technologies with a continued commitment to education and innovative research, as well as engaging academia, government and industry in all activities. We strive to achieve our mission through a partnership between industry and academia, bridging cultures to find solutions to the challenges associated with developing and implementing biometric technologies.

Our research focuses on solving issues that are observed in the field. Our wide and varied research agenda includes performance analysis, identity management, usability, and user perception of biometric systems. We offer a complete research experience: from designing experiments, to collecting data using human subjects, to statistically analyzing results.

Personnel

Prof. Steve Elliott

In response to the growing demand for faster and higher quality wireless applications and infrastructure, Purdue University has developed the Center for Wireless Systems and Applications (CWSA). Established as a university-wide initiative in 2002, CWSA follows a comprehensive approach to research and education in wireless that interconnects resources, ideas, and expertise.

CWSA supports innovative, large-scale, multidisciplinary research activities, educates tomorrow’s engineering leaders, and provides an environment that fosters teamwork and strategic collaborations to accelerate development of wireless technologies, systems, and applications.

Personnel

Prof. Saurabh Bagchi, Prof. Bharat Bhargava, Prof. Barrett Caldwell. Prof. Ed Delp, Prof. Sonia Fahmy, Prof. Arif Ghafoor, Prof. David Love, Prof. Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Prof. Sunil Prabhakar, Prof. Sanjay Rao, Prof. Dongyan Xu, Prof. David K Y Yau

The mission of the Computing Research Institute (CRI) is to facilitate multidisciplinary research in high-performance computing (HPC) at Purdue. As of January 2007, CRI has joined the Cyber Center, representing the Center’s high-end computing branch.

Personnel

Prof. Ahmed Elmagarmid

The Cyber Center at Purdue University is an effort to bring to bear the explosion of information technology-related discoveries and apply them in a focused manner to the discovery and learning processes.

In addition, the Cyber Center provides a venue for all IT-related research, hardware, software, and staffing to come together in a single venue allowing new discoveries that can have immediate impact on discovery, learning, and engagement.

The Cyber Center places Purdue in a competitive advantage by accelerating discovery which leads to new avenues of research both in IT and in disciplines that have not yet realized the full potential for cyber infrastructure supported research.

The Center institutionalizes an integrated cyber infrastructure that benefits basic research across the campus. The co-location and shared research objectives are powerful drivers in the development new technology, new discoveries, and new businesses. This facilitates start-up businesses, new jobs, and economic development for the State of Indiana.

Personnel

Prof. Elisa Bertino, Prof. David Ebert, Prof. Saurabh Bagchi, Prof. Arif Ghafoor,

The faculty and students of the Purdue Cyber Forensics Lab, housed in the Department of Industrial Technology, work closely with federal and state law enforcement officials to develop and deliver the training needed to combat cybercrime. FBI estimates put cybercrime costs to businesses and the government at more than $10 billion a year—to which identity theft adds another $1 billion in cost annually. Lab work is also dedicated to developing better investigative methods for cybercrime (e.g., cyberterrorism/espionage, bank and business fraud, and identity theft) and national standards for computer forensic education and certification. The goal is to increase the number of trained officers and educators and to ensure that the evidence found is admissible in court. External partners include the National Institute of Justice, the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Indiana State Police.

Personnel

Prof. Marc Rogers, Prof. Sam Liles

The Dependable and Secure Distributed Systems Laboratory (DS²) at Purdue University focuses on designing distributed systems, networks and applications that are dependable and secure, while maintaining acceptable levels of performance. The work conducted within the lab explores how cryptographic protocols can be used to design distributed systems that are resilient to a wide-range of attacks. Of particular interest is the research of systems and network protocols operating under a Byzantine adversarial model. Such systems are often referred as intrusion-tolerant systems, since their approach is not to detect intruders, but rather guarantee correct service in spite of compromised participants.

Personnel

Prof. Cristina Nita-Rotaru

We are interested in the question of how to build heterogeneous large-scale distributed systems that are reliable, in the face of different classes of failures. Since many business and life critical functions are being performed by distributed systems, they need to be reliable while meeting their performance goals. Thus, there is need for smart error detection, diagnosis and recovery protocols. More importantly, there is need for architectures that can combine fault tolerance aspects with performance aspects in an adaptive manner, adapting to different user requirements and different runtime environments. We consider intrusions to be an increasingly important class of faults and are therefore looking at the design of intrusion tolerant systems. For concrete application context for our work, we use wireless ad hoc networks, Voice over IP systems, and distributed e-commerce systems.

Personnel

Prof. Saurabh Bagchi

Plans for the $10 million Discovery Park complex were unveiled in 2001. The goal was to assemble researchers from diverse specialties to promote synergy among faculty, students, business, and industry that would lead to innovation. Centers at the park include the Burton D. Morgan Entrepreneurship Center, the Bindley Bioscience Center, the Birck Nanotechnology Center, the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue, and the e-Enterprise Center.

The current efforts at the Lab For Research In Emerging Network and Distributed Systems (FRIENDS) focus on the development of virtualization technologies for malware investigation and defense and for virtual distributed computing. The lab has developed Collapsar, one of the first VM-based honeyfarm architectures for network attack capture and detention. A safe, high-fidelity emulation environment called vGround has also been developed for conducting destruction-oriented malware experiments. More recently, the lab has been investigating VMM-level solutions to the detection, prevention, and forensics of highly stealthy malware such as rootkits and bots.

Personnel

Prof. Dongyan Xu

The Global Policy Research Institute (GPRI) at Purdue will increase the visibility of Purdue’s research findings and enhance the impact of the University’s discoveries for the common good.

Purdue University, with internationally recognized professors, top ranked graduate programs and a distinctive framework for interdisciplinary discovery is uniquely positioned to address the need for rapid advances in science, engineering and technology with the help of the Global Policy Research Institute.

Purdue offers an undergraduate certificate in network security at its Indianapolis location in the IUPUI Computer and Information Technology departments. Students pursue a curriculum of five courses that include an introduction to digital forensics and applied facets of cryptography, in addition to one elective. Through this partnership, CERIAS will be able to deliver course content to information technology professionals located in downtown Indianapolis more conveniently.

The mission of the Institute is threefold: fulfill educational and training needs of the Homeland Security professionals; accelerate the discovery, validation, and implementation of new knowledge and tools for sustainable homeland security; and engage with key stakeholders in meeting the challenges associated with homeland security. The Institute is organized into seven signature areas that include food and plant security as well as economic security.

Personnel

Prof. Eric Dietz, Prof. Sandy Amass

The Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University is improving the efficiency, quality and accessibility of healthcare by tapping into expertise in engineering, science, management and social sciences. Launched in 2005 with a gift from the Regenstrief Foundation, the center is the only integrated university-wide effort in healthcare engineering in the nation.

Personnel

Dr. Steve Witz, Dr. Ken Musselman

The S³ group brings together researchers exploring diverse aspects of programming language design and implementation.

The S³ group investigates static approaches (such as program analysis and compiler optimization) to problems of performance, correctness, and usability in object-oriented, functional, and real-time programs, dynamic techniques to improve run-time execution and performance on modern multi-core systems, and software engineering mechanisms for program slicing and specification mining.

S³’s work has contributed several open-source software prototypes in the areas of mobile and untrusted computation, embedded systems, concurrency, compilers for functional and object-oriented languages, and persistent programming.

Personnel

Prof. Patrick Eugster, Prof. Tony Hosking, Prof. Jan Vitek, Prof. Xiangyu Zhang

VACCINE’s goal is to help this nation’s 2.3 million extended homeland security personnel, including first-responders, perform their jobs more effectively by turning mass amounts of data into manageable information.

Turning massive data into actionable knowledge through innovative visual analytic techniques is vital to the mission of the Command, Control, and Interoperability (CCI) Division of The Department of Homeland Security, as well as all of the mission areas of DHS.

Personnel

David Ebert, Bill Cleveland, Chris Clifton, Ed Delp, Arif Ghafoor, Sunil Prabhakar

Video and Imaging Processing Laboratory (VIPER) is equipped with state-of-the-art technology to digitize, store, process, stream, and display digital video and images. This technology supports research in areas such as the developing of new video compression techniques, new streaming technologies, and creating multimedia material for use in video indexing, storage, and retrieval. In the security arena, the lab examines digital watermarking techniques. Lab faculty also explore object forensics, including printer forensics, which has applications for both anti-counterfeiting efforts and intellectual property disputes.

Personnel

Prof. Ed Delp