This combination of technology, business issues,
policy concerns, leadership, and ethics makes our
program unique and will allow us to produce highly
qualified researchers and educators. The center
faculty members have a long history of technology
and interaction with industry.
The figure below shows the relationship between
the research areas and the departments involved.
According to Richard Clarke,
Former Homeland Security Adviser for Combating Cyber
Terrorism, “Our very way of life depends on
the secure and safe operations of critical systems
that depend on cyberspace.” (CNN, October 9,
2001). Infrastructure security is a pressing issue
that needs immediate research attention. To that end,
we propose a multi-university Center for Information
Protection with Iowa State and its Information Assurance
Center (IAC) as the lead entities.
Iowa State has formed a partnership with Mississippi
State University and University of Kansas to develop
a NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center
(CRC) in Information Assurance. This project has
received phase-two NSF funding ($30,000, $10,000
per school), which will be used to create the center
and solicit financial commitments from industrial
sponsors. Iowa State currently has two CRC centers—the
Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (Iowa State
is the sole university) and PSerc (a partnership
of 12 universities).
We have identified intrusion detection, ad-hoc
network security, and attack-tolerant systems as
the core research areas for the new center. This
is a subset of the overall capabilities of the faculty
members who will be involved with the proposed CIP.
It is likely that the list of research areas will
grow as planning continues and industry gets involved.
The past several years have seen a surge of Internet
security research in the field of information assurance,
which primarily focused on protecting the data using
techniques such as authentication and encryption.
However, information assurance assumes that the
devices responsible for encrypting, forwarding,
and sending are trustworthy. Scientists are now
questioning these assumptions, as instances have
taken place where the network infrastructure (e.g.,
routers, servers) is compromised to the advantage
of the malicious adversaries. The center will focus
on all aspects of protecting information.
As part of phase two, we will hold an industrial
planning meeting in August 2003 with the goal of
obtaining $600,000 in funding commitments from industrial
partners. Once the required funding has been obtained,
NSF will designate Iowa State a center and we will
receive funding to help support the operation of
the center. The creation of this center will help
facilitate high quality research among the faculty
from the three universities and will lead to an
increase in federal research funding.
Currently the Information Assurance Center contains
several labs that are used to conduct research.
Each lab is equipped with new and innovative technology
to help accelerate the abilities of the researchers.
In an attempt to keep a running record of published
materials, referenced and noted to various professors
under in the Information Assurance Center, we have
gathered and linked the materials within this section.
The Information Assurance Center has been a host
to many projects and many of them continue to expand
and grow under the guise of the professors and researchers.
Each project is an asset to the Information Assurance
Center. In this section you can find links to the
various projects that are currently being researched
and developed.
