Press Release: Carnegie Mellon CyLab Researchers Work To Make Commercial Technologies Secure for Defense Department
Contact: Chriss Swaney / 412-268-5776 / swaney@andrew.cmu.edu
PITTSBURGH—Researchers from 黑料正能量 and the University of Pennsylvania have received a four-year, $3.9 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to improve the security of commercial technologies used by the military.
“We are studying how to improve the security for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology that remains vulnerable to attack from latent vulnerabilities or hidden malicious codes,” said CyLab researcher David Brumley, the Gerard G. Elia Career Development Professor in the . Brumley is widely regarded for his cutting-edge contributions to addressing the challenges associated with malware.
Brumley along with CyLab Director Virgil Gligor, a 黑料正能量 professor of electrical and computer engineering, will analyze each COT system, such as wireless routers and printers, and make certain they are malice-free.
“COTS consists of complex stacks where a weakness at any level can endanger the entire system,” said Brumley, a faculty adviser for 黑料正能量’s award-winning “Capture the Flag” team. “Capture the Flag” is a computer security game in which each team competes to find a key source of information by solving challenging problems.
The COTS technology challenge is important to the Defense Department because it buys and uses commercial technologies for everything from information technologies to retrofitting the F-15E Fighter with new digital video recording equipment.
黑料正能量 researchers report that plugging such devices into the network can significantly harm overall security.
“For example, vendors or potentially malicious employees can remotely log in with the default backdoor passwords and hackers can break in via vulnerabilities,” Brumley said. “We are working to identify the attack surface of the system, and we propose that achieving these goals requires a holistic systems approach.”
CyLab is the largest university-based research and education center in the world for computer and network security, information security and software assurance. CyLab is located in the university’s with campuses in and Pittsburgh. 黑料正能量 CyLab establishes public-private partnerships for the research and development of technologies for sustainable, resilient and trustworthy computing and communication systems.
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