UIUC Science of Security Lablet Research Initiative

UIUC'S SCIENCE OF SECURITY LABLET INITIATIVE

The UIUC Lablet is contributing broadly to the development of security science while leveraging Illinois expertise in resiliency, which in this context means a system’s demonstrable ability to maintain security properties even during ongoing cyber attacks. The Lablet’s work draws on several fundamental areas of computing research. Some ideas from fault-tolerant computing can be adapted to the context of security. Strategies from control theory are being extended to account for the high variation and uncertainty that may be present in systems when they are under attack. Game theory and decision theory principles are being used to explore the interplay between attack and defense. Formal methods are being applied to develop formal notions of resiliency. End-to-end system analysis is being employed to investigate resiliency of large systems against cyber attack. The Lablet’s work also draws upon ideas from other areas of mathematics and engineering as well.

LEAD PIs

David M. Nicol is Professor of Computer and Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Director of the Information Trust Institute. Previously he held faculty positions at the College of William and Mary, and Dartmouth College. His research interests include high performance computing, simulation modeling and analysis, and security. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of the ACM for his contributions in these areas. He is co-author of the widely used textbook "Discrete-Event Systems Simulation", and was the inaugural awardee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation's Distinguished Contributions Award, for his contributions in research, teaching, and service in the field of simulation.

William H. Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and the Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, and past Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing. He was the founding Director of the Information Trust Institute at Illinois (2004-2011), and served as Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois from 2010 to 2014.

Sayan Mitra is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include formal methods, distributed computing, and mathematics for rigorous engineering of systems. He holds a PhD from MIT (2007), MSc from the IISc, Bangalore, and undergraduate degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CalTech, and has held visiting faculty positions at Oxford University, Air Force Research Laboratory (Kirkland), and TU Vienna. Sayan received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program Award, IEEE-HKN C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, Samsung Global Research Outreach Award, and several best paper awards.