Stony Brook, NY, March 4, 2013 

The Department of Computer Science (CS) at Stony Brook University (SBU) proudly announces a joint research award with the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Vyas Sekar was recently awarded a 358K grant from ONR as part of collaborative research with Mike Reiter in the area of adaptive and scalable network policy enforcement.

Their ambitious research seeks to dramatically improve the scalability and power of network intrusion detection (NIDS) and prevention (NIPS) systems. NIDS and NIPS are critical in detecting and dropping malicious or unwanted network traffic. It is a continuous challenge for NIDS and NIPS to keep up with increases in traffic volume in large networks and policy enforcement.

According to Dr. Sekar, “The usual solution to this problem is to buy new or specialized hardware. Hardware upgrade cycle delays can be as high as 3—5 years and leave the network vulnerable in the interim. Our solution will provide a way to solve scaling problems without the need to purchase expensive hardware upgrades for every network location.”

The network-wide view will transparently increase capacity without increasing costs. The ONR recognizes the value of the proposed research and the need to develop a focused and effective research plan involving formulating and implementing precise optimization frameworks, updating software routers or NIDS/NIPS implementations, and validations. Both professors expect to engage faculty and graduate-level students in their research which will occur over a three year period.

Dr. Sekar joined the CS Department at Stony Brook University in 2012. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. As part of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at SBU, the CS Department is the preeminent research and technology center in the SUNY system. For more information on CS at SBU, visit http://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/

Compiled by: christine [at] cs.stonybrook.edu (Christine Cesaria)