NSF Offers Grant to Tipper
October 28, 2008 - David Tipper, Associate Professor and Chair of the Telecommunications & Networking Program, has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop and test methods for evaluating information assurance mechanisms for Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The two-year grant will support a collaborative effort between researchers at three different institutions: Duke University, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Pittsburgh. There is a critical need for systematic Information Assurance (IA) methods that enable ICT systems to adapt and survive any type of disruption or attack. A major hurdle in the development of such IA techniques is the lack of models and metrics which support evaluating the effectiveness of IA mechanisms. This project is focused on the development of metrics and models that will allow one to quantitatively study the technical aspects of IA for the network component of the ICT infrastructure. The basis of the approach is to build a common scalable framework with a well-defined set of metrics and application scenarios. The impact of the models and metrics developed is that they will provide the techniques and tools necessary to determine the effectiveness of IA mechanisms. In addition, they will allow for the detection of bottlenecks and the evaluation of tradeoffs between levels of information assurance, performance and cost.
Professor Tipper has been on the faculty of the iSchool since 1994 and became Chair of the Telecommunications and Networking Program in 2007. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Arizona in 1988. His current research interests include network design, virtual network design, methods for improving network survivability, the development of efficient algorithms for nonstationary/transient queuing analysis, and the design and analysis of network controls (e.g. routing, admission control, scheduling, etc.) His research has been supported by grants from various government and corporate sources such as the National Science Foundation, IBM, DARPA and MCI.