Spy agency names UCI top foe of cyber attackers
May 19th, 2008, 3:00 am · 1 Comment · posted by grobbins
UC Irvine has become a leader in finding ways to protect the country’s most critical computer systems from attacks by hackers and other intruders, says the National Security Agency, the United State’s top guardian of information and intelligence.
NSA and the Department of Homeland Security named UCI a National Center of Academic Excellence in the burgeoning field of Information Assurance, or IA — a designation shared by only 23 institutions across the nation.
UCI earned the designation largely based on research in the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, whose scientists do IA work that can be applied to everything from producing weather reports to helping police investigate crimes to protecting bank transactions to repelling cyber attacks on military computers.
UCI’s IA experts include Xiaowei Yang, who develops counter-measures that thwart attacks by hackers on websites, to Michael Franz, who creates techniques to stop or repair damage by hackers virtually as it happens, to Alfred Kobsa, who analyzes how national and international laws affect personal privacy on computer systems.
“Having this designation makes it easier for the government and military to hire UCI students to work in Information Assurance jobs,” says Michael Goodrich, a Chancellor’s professor of computer science at UCI who led the effort to get the NSA title.
“This designation also improves the chances of UCI being awarded federal research grants in Information Assurance, since it provides independent justification that the faculty at UCI are highly qualified to do research in Information Assurance.”
The research is broad in scope. Goodrich says: “Information Assurance deals with the protection of information, from packets to printouts, and goes beyond just
protection from cyber pirates. It includes issues of privacy protection, confidentiality, as well as methods for authentication (proving our identities in digital forums) and authorization (proving our rights to digital content).
“Application areas include cyber-fraud detection and prevention in financial databases (we have a gift from Experian to study this topic, for example), allowing for confidential communications in large organizations and groups, as well as digital notions of
signatures, bank checks, contracts, and secret handshakes.”
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May 24th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Sounds great. Maybe some student can design a program that prevents the NSA from wiretapping into our AT&T telephone system without obtaining a court order. And I do not mean that spy non-public court system. I mean some public open-for-everyone to review court system.
No NSA. The Congress is not going to grant your little buddies at AT&T a “get out of jail card free” when you forced them to grant you access into their rooms up north to wire-tap American citizens’ phones. You are lucky I am not President. Your agency heads would be publicly prosecuted and thrown into prison.