Cisco Grant to LERSAIS
The School of Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh is pleased to announce that CISCO has awarded a grant to support research undertaken by Dr. James Joshi, Associate Professor. The networking leader has funded a proposal to create a distributed collaborative traffic monitoring system, DiCoTraM. The grant, for $54,000, will underwrite the personnel and travel costs of this year-long project, which will create technologies to protect critical networking environments. The proposal notes that existing host-based and centralized network-based monitoring tools have been less than effective in detecting intrusions and attacks on systems. They suffer from high storage and processing overheard, or from a lack of information which inhibits detection of attacks. Research has suggested that defense mechanisms should foster collaborative approaches in which monitoring tasks are deployed throughout many locations in the network, thus permitting timely detection and arrest of intrusions. Therefore, Dr. Joshi and his team plan to develop a distributed, collaborative framework to monitor network traffic. They will then deploy the developed DiCoTraM system in a cloud computing environment, ensuring that it will eliminate redundant monitoring and effectively find and stop system attacks in this emerging computing environment. This project compliments Dr. Joshi's research in information assurance and security, which focuses on the areas of access control, distributed and multi-media systems security, and network survivability. Joshi, an Associate Professor in the iSchool, has successfully acquired significant funding for both his research and curriculum development efforts in the information assurance area. Working with Dr. Joshi will be Saman Taghavi Zargar, a PhD student in the iSchool’s Telecommunications and Networking Program. Mr. Zargar, who joined the school in 2008, earned his Master’s in Computer Engineering at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran.