From spaf@cerias.purdue.edu  Fri May 29 23:48:19 1998
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To: coastwatch@cs.purdue.edu
Subject: New PhD Thesis available, and some news
From: Gene Spafford <coastwatch-request@cs.purdue.edu>
Reply-to: coastwatch-request@cs.purdue.edu
X-URI: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/coast
Organization: COAST, Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.
Approved: spaf@cs.purdue.edu
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 23:48:17 -0500
Sender: spaf@cs.purdue.edu

I'll start with a brief apology for the spotty traffic on this list.
We have been a bit understaffed here at COAST over the last year, and
I have been hindered by a repetitive stress injury problem with my
hands.  Thus, we haven't been quite as good at keeping you all up to
date with our progress as we might like.

With the formation of the CERIAS, we are finally hiring some staff.
We hope this helps the situation.  In the meantime, we will continue
to make various papers and reports available via our WWW pages, and
make occasional announcements here in this list.

Coming up in the next few months:
  * CERIAS/COAST cosponsoring a workshop on security in large-scale
distributed systems (October, at Purdue)
  * CERIAS/COAST sponsoring a workshop on use and distribution of 
vulnerability databases (probably December, at Purdue)
  * A public beta release of our AAFID distributed intrusion detection
system (written in Perl).  (Probably August)

A few other things are in the works, but we don't want to announce them
until we are more certain of their outcome.


And, May saw the graduation of several of our students, including our
most recent Ph.D.: Dr. Ivan Krsul.

Ivan was one of the founding students of the COAST Lab.  After many
years study, that included some groundbreaking MS thesis work in
software forensics, Ivan defended his thesis, entitled "Software
Vulnerability Analysis."  Included in his work, Ivan performed an
in-depth study of several hundred known security vulnerabilities, and
constructed a formal classification scheme based on his observations.
We hope that others will adopt his characterization of vulnerabilities
so that the community can begin to use a common terminology.

Copies of Dr. Krsul's dissertation may be downloaded from the COAST
archive server at:
    ftp://coast/pub/COAST/papers/ivan-krsul/krsul-phd-thesis.pdf
    ftp://coast/pub/COAST/papers/ivan-krsul/krsul-phd-thesis.ps.Z

Currently, Ivan is back home in Bolivia, taking a break before deciding
what to do next.  You may address questions and comments on his work to
<krsul@cs.purdue.edu> (and also to <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>).

Enjoy your summer.
--gene spafford
COAST Director
CERIAS Director