> DDMC home > Research Projects: Cyber-Security

---

Security — Cyber-Security

Security — Cyber-Security

Information technology (IT) has become the engine that drives our modern enterprises within the public and private sectors. Government agencies and businesses have become increasingly reliant on IT systems to carry out important missions and functions and to increase their productivity.

However, the very same information infrastructure that has brought a high degree of agility to our society has also created a degree of fragility — which if not remedied can cause serious damage to societal and economic wellbeing. For example, there have been several incidents (e.g., Code-Red I & II, Nimda, and more recently the SQL Slammer and Blaster worm attacks) of large-scale, distributed denial-of-service attacks in just the last two or three years. The intention of these attacks was not simply to infect a few machines, but to affect large portions of the Internet by shutting down millions of servers and clogging the information “superhighways.”

The research community must address these and various other issues, to develop tools, techniques, policies, processes, and practices, that will contain the threat against the society’s cyber infrastructure, and ensure its smooth functioning. Towards this, there is a need for in depth analyses and surveys of existing literature — a significant fraction of it carried out by universities and national laboratories, and sponsored by the defense and intelligence communities — which will help refine the societal research agenda in the area of cyber threat management.