Research Project Title
Achieving Trusted Systems by Providing Security and Reliability

Principal Investigators
Ravi K. Iyer

Unit # 22
Project Overview

This project focuses on security and reliability as the key attributes/aspects in building highly trusted systems. System security violations (e.g., an unauthorized privileged access or compromising data integrity) can be caused by hardware errors (transient or intermittent), software bugs, resource exhaustions, environmental conditions, or any complex interaction between the above factors. In providing effective techniques to cope with security violations it is crucial to understand the nature of the variety of security attacks and to explore mechanisms in which errors (e.g., error propagation) can cause security vulnerabilities. Moreover, taking into account the complexity and increasing network connectivity of computing systems it is unlikely that the goal of a completely secure system will be ever achieved. As a result, we must explore and develop intrusion detection systems to uncover and rapidly react to computer attacks.

The objective of this research is to address the above challenges by investigating issues and techniques for intrusion detection and intrusion tolerance. In doing so we will attempt to answer several questions, including:
• How to prevent an intruder from getting unauthorized access to the system.
• How to identify an unauthorized user or activities in the system.
• What course of actions to follow once an intruder is detected in the system.
• How to classify different security attacks.
• What measures and procedures to apply for characterizing system security and reliability.