The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
The Center for Education and Research inInformation Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Panel Members:
Summary by Ryan Poyar
The first panel of the 2010 annual security symposium kicked things off to a great start and an interesting discussion. The topic was the Visualization of Security. The focus of the panel was to address the issue of how to use the vast amounts of data that is available in a way that can help predict and protect systems from future threats. Alok Chaturvedi, a professor at Purdue, initiated the discussion by describing how using visualization could potentially make it possible to display large amounts of data in a meaningful way. Donald Robinson from Northrop Grumman rationalized the use of using visualization with his argument that as humans we are naturally very good at recognizing patterns and making sense of visualizations as opposed to dealing with raw data. Currently, this technique is being researched through the project VACCINE (Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments) which is primarily focused on helping the mission of the Department of Homeland Security. As one of the researchers working on VACCINE, Ross Maciejewski described that the goal of the project was to be able to determine potential threats from an abundance of streaming real-time data sources and then further to provide real-time targeted counter measures against each threat. While all of this sounds very good in theory, getting it to work in practice requires many hurdles to be overcome. The discussion for the remainder of the panel was a debate on who should be responsible for making the threat determination from the data and then who should determine the correct response. Even in a non-real-time environment with only humans this is a very tricky endeavor. It seems that it is necessary for a specific expert in each field to analyze the data from their perspective and look for threats based on their expertise only. If a threat is found, it is then very difficult to determine who has the right background and is the best choice to mitigate it. Further, who has the ability to foresee threats that cross multiple disciplines? If we have a difficult time answering these questions in a detailed, comprehensive, non-real-time environment how will we be able to design a system a priori that can answer future questions in real-time?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Summary by Jason Ortiz
Mike McConnell, retired Admiral of the Navy, former Director of NSA and former Director of National Intelligence delivered the opening keynote speech for the eleventh annual CERIAS Security Symposium. The majority of this keynote was devoted to recounting his experiences and efforts to move forward national cyber capabilities. The following is a summary of those efforts.
Admiral McConnell opened the address with a simple statement: "The nation is at significant risk." He pointed out that the United States' economy and livelihood is in information streams. If those streams are interrupted or tampered with, the United States could lose trillions of dollars almost instantly.
McConnell continued the keynote by making three predictions. The first of those was the idea that the United States will continue to talk about cyber defenses but not really do anything until after a catastrophic cyber event. The Admiral supported this idea by pointing out that if extremist groups were to focus their efforts on cyber attacks, they could disrupt transportation and the economy. As evidenced by attacks last spring in California (criminals cut fiber optic cables), they could also disrupt services such as 9-11 service, internet connectivity, and cellular phone service.
McConnell's second prediction was that after a catastrophic event, the government of the United States would suddenly lurch into action. They will pass laws, appropriate money and work to prevent the same sort of catastrophe from reoccurring. After all, Washington D.C. responds to four things: crisis, the ballot box, money and law. A catastrophic cyber attack would generate changes or problems in all four of these areas.
McConnell then proceeded to explain the most important aspects of cyber security as he learned as Director of the NSA. The first most important aspect is authentication. The second most important aspect is data integrity. The third aspect is non-repudiation. The fourth is availability, and the least important aspect is the ciphertext itself (encryption).
Finally, the third prediction made by Admiral McConnell was that the United States would reengineer the internet. He explained how the military uses the internet and predicts that the entire national network will be implemented in a similar manner in the future. Concerning the government, it is McConnell's belief that the government can help to implement the redesigned and more secure network.
The 12th anniversary of CERIAS is looming (in May). As part of the display materials for our fast-approaching annual CERIAS Symposium (register now!), I wanted to get a sense of the impact of our educational activities in addition to our research. What I found surprised me -- and may surprise many others!
Back in 1997, a year before the formation of CERIAS, I presented testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on "Secure Communications." For that presentation, I surveyed peers around the country to determine something about the capacity of U.S. higher education in the field of information security and privacy (this was before the term "cyber" was popularized). I discovered that, at the time, there were only four defined programs in the country. We estimated that there were fewer than 20 academic faculty in the US at that time who viewed information security other than cryptography as their primary area of emphasis. (The reason we excluded cryptography was because there were many people who were working in abstract mathematics that could be applied to cryptography but who knew extremely little about information security as a field, and certainly were not teaching it).
The best numbers I could come up with from surveying all those people was that, as of 1997, U.S. higher education was graduating only about three new Ph.D. students a year in information security, Thus, there were also very few faculty producing new well-educated experts at any level, and too small a population to easily grow new programs. I noted in my remarks that the output was too low by at least two orders of magnitude for national needs (and was at least 3-5 orders too low for international needs).
As I have noted before, my testimony helped influence the creations of (among other things) the NSA's CAE program and the Scholarship for Service program. Both provided some indirect support for increasing the number of Ph.D graduates and courses at all postsecondary levels. The SfS has been a qualified success, although the CAE program not so much.
When CERIAS was formed, one element of our strategic plan was to focus on helping other institutions build up their capacity to offer infosec courses at every level, as a matter of strategic leadership. We decided to do this through five concurrent approaches:
Our goal was not only to produce new expertise, but to retrain personnel with strong backgrounds in computing and computing education. Transformation was the only way we could see that a big impact could be made quickly.
We have had considerable success at all five of these initiatives. Currently, there are several dozen classes in CERIAS focus areas across Purdue. In addition to the more traditional graduate degrees, our Interdisciplinary graduate degree program is small but competitive and has led to new courses. Overall, on the Ph.D. front, we anticipate another 15 Ph.D. grads this May, bringing the total CERIAS output of PhD.s over 12 years to 135. To the best of our ability to estimate (using some figures from NSF and elsewhere), that was about 25% of all U.S. PhDs in the first decade that CERIAS was in existence, and we are currently graduating about 20% of U.S. output. Many of those graduates have taught or still teach at colleges and universities, even if part-time. We have also graduated many hundreds of MS and undergrad students with some deep coursework and research experience in information security and privacy issues.
We have hosted several score post-docs and visiting faculty over the years, and always welcome more --- our only limitation right now is available funding. For several years, we had an intensive summer program for faculty from 2 and 4-year schools, many of which are serving minority and disadvantaged populations. Graduates of that program went on to create many new courses at their home institutions. We had to discontinue this program after a few years because of, again, lack of funding.
Our academic affiliates program ran for five years, and we believe it was a great success. Several schools with only one or two faculty working in the area were able to leverage the partnership to get grants and educational resources, and are now notable for their own intrinsic capabilities. We discontinued the affiliates program several years ago as we realized all but one of those partners had "graduated."
So, how can we measure the impact of this aspect of our strategic plan? Perhaps by simply coming up with some numbers....We compiled a list of anyone who had been through CERIAS (and a few years of COAST, prior) who:
We gathered from them (as many as we could reach) the names of any higher education institution where they taught courses related to security, privacy or cyber crime. We also folded in the names of our academic affiliates at which such courses were (or still are) offered. The resultant list has over 100 entries! Even if we make a somewhat moderate estimate of the number of people who took these classes, we are well into the tens of thousands of students impacted, in some way, and possibly above 100,000, worldwide. That doesn't include the indirect effect, because many of those students have gone on (or will) to teach in higher education -- some of our Ph.D. grads have already turned out Ph.D. grads who now have their own Ph.D. students!
Seeing the scope of that impact is gratifying. And knowing that we will do more in the years ahead is great motivation, too.
Of course, it is also a little frustrating, because we could have done more, and more needs to be done. However, the approaches we have used (and are interested in trying next) never fit into any agency BAA. Thus, we have (almost) never been able to get grant support for our educational efforts. And, in many cases, the effort, overhead and delays in the application processes aren't worth the funding that is available. (The same is true of many of our research and outreach activities, but that is a topic for another time.)
We've been able to get this far because of the generosity of the companies and agencies that have been CERIAS general supporters over the years -- thank you! Our current supporters are listed on the CERIAS WWW site (hint: we're open to adding more!). We're also had a great deal of support within Purdue University from faculty, staff and the administration. It has been a group effort, but one that has really made a positive difference in the world....and provides us motivation to continue to greater heights.
See you at the CERIAS Symposium!
Here is the list of the 106 107 108 educational institutions [last updated 3/21,1600 EDT]:
