The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has awarded $1,356,071 to the University of California San Diego to develop new capabilities to better enable cyber security researchers to measure the Internet’s vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks.
The award is part of S&T’s Cyber Security Division’s (CSD) larger Internet Measurement and Attack Modeling (IMAM) project that works with researchers in academia and the cybersecurity community to develop solutions in the areas of resilient systems, modeling of Internet attacks and network mapping and measurement.
“The UC San Diego project focuses on unexplored areas of the cybersecurity domain that will give the research community a fuller understanding of infrastructure vulnerabilities and of new approaches for measuring and analyzing critical cyber infrastructure that is tied to the Internet,” said S&T Cyber Security Director Douglas Maughan.
The IMAM project is aligned with the 2016 Federal Cyber Security Research and Development strategic initiatives to develop realistic experimental data that emulates external adversary activities and defensive behavior.
(Learn More about the DHS S&T Cyber Security Division, courtesy of DHS S&T and YouTube)
It is also aligned with the S&T Strategic Plan’s goals for the Cyber Security Division, specifically the goal to develop new tools and techniques for mapping several layers of the Internet to detect and mitigate malicious behavior.
“The UC San Diego project because it will deliver groundbreaking capabilities in Internet measurement and identification of infrastructure vulnerabilities,” said Dr. Ann Cox, S&T IMAM program manager.
“Examples include assessment of vulnerabilities in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a widely used protocol on the Internet, and identification of multiple IP addresses that belong to the same router, known as alias resolution.”
“The Internet has grown organically and there are many things yet to be discovered. The knowledge developed in this project will enable better defenses for critical infrastructure that is tied to the Internet.”
Through this S&T-funded project, the UC San Diego Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) will expand the scale and capabilities of its secure platform Archipelago (Ark), which supports large-scale active measurement studies of the global Internet.
The project will achieve a systematic, continuous and complete knowledge-base needed to monitor and analyze inter-domain route hijacking and other security-related phenomena.
CSD’s mission is to enhance the security and resilience of the nation’s critical information infrastructure and the Internet by developing and delivering new technologies, tools and techniques to defend, mitigate and secure current and future systems, networks and infrastructure against cyberattacks.
For more information about CSD, visit cyber-research or email SandT-Cyber-Liaison@hq.dhs.gov.
