Security News > 2002 > March > New University of Illinois Center Focuses on Information Security
Forwarded from: William Knowles http://www.i-street.com/newsarchive/yr2002/mn02/27is.asp February 27, 2002 10:00 By Jeff Meredith CHICAGO - Information security has gained a newfound urgency the last few months and the University of Illinois is maneuvering itself to become a key supplier of such products. This week, the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Argus Systems Group, Inc., a Savoy, Il.-based vendor of Internet security products, jointly launched the Center for Advanced Research in Information Security (CARIS). CARIS will be located in the Department of Computer Science, designated by the U.S. National Security Agency as a Center of Academic Excellence, and will focus on next generation security technologies. Smart Card systems, through which companies provide digital credentials or access capabilities based off of user identification, are among the products CARIS hopes to deploy. "There are a variety of different ways to do authentification and carry credentials around. We were looking at ways that they could be used together with some of the Argus technology - where you're using a combination of a Smart Card, trusted servers," said Roy Campbell, a computer science professor and director of CARIS. "How do you get these things to integrate, how do you manage it?" CARIS looks to build trusted systems. Some of the center's findings could also be relevant to virus and worm outbreaks. Campbell said that instead of taking the approach of a McAfee anti-viral software system that features attachment pre-screening, CARIS is looking to halt the progress of viruses as they are working. "Our approach is more to detect abnormal behavior in programs as they're actually executed," said Campbell. "If you receive a strange package, you can detect it and stop it before it corrupts your system. It would work well with McAfee's style of approach, but it's sort of complementary." The opening of CARIS is not accompanied by any new funding, but Campbell said that there's existing funding to do security research and the center will be bootstrapping its way to future projects. By pairing with the private sector, he expects university research to more speedily yield products for the marketplace. "CARIS is a locus for people to get together and discuss how to approach security. The government's producing a lot of different programs in security and usually the funding they're offering is in specific areas and it's usually attached to trying to develop some research to the point where it's actually transferred into industry,' said Campbell. "By having a center, we can affect that. We can do both parts of the equation - come up with research and develop it to the point where it's useful for industry. To turn that research into a product that's put into the marketplace. It's a way of shortcutting what would normally occur." *==============================================================* "Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ================================================================ C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org *==============================================================* - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.