Research Labs and Groups

The Biometrics Standards, Performance, and Assurance Laboratory, housed in the Department of Industrial Technology, is a cross-disciplinary laboratory that encourages the development of undergraduate and graduate research in the field of biometric technologies. Two significant initiatives are underway.

The Biometrics and Manufacturing Security Initiative examines the issues relating to the integration of biometric technologies within the manufacturing environment. The project will require the integration of biometric technologies for both physical access control and logical access control to CNC machines and other related manufacturing hardware. It is also anticipated hat there will be additional benefit for distance education, as individuals will have to be authenticated prior to cycling the machine.

The biometrics and Human Computer Interface Initiative explores how individuals interact with biometric devices as a factor in evaluating the performance of the device. Research is also being planned to assess how the elderly interact with biometric devices.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 e-Enterprise Center (e-Center) engages in research in the application of digital technology to business, government, and societal problems. It brings together faculty and students with strengths in modeling, simulation, optimization, database systems, software engineering, information security, communication, management, algorithm engineering, operations research, production systems, decision theory, system analysis, risk management, marketing, and customer service. The e-Center serves to integrate the knowledge in these areas to create methods that will enable an entire process (e.g. supply chain, manufacturing system, new product development pipeline, customer service, transportation network, distributed information system, product life-cycle, infrastructure) to be rapidly modeled, analyzed, and made more efficient and secure.

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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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