CIS Research Thrusts

Critical Infrastructure Protection

This project is devising strategies for protecting Oklahoma's information and telecommunications assets. The effort integrates technological, legal and policy solutions to coherently address critical infrastructure protection.

Telecommunications Security

This project is developing techniques and systems for securing public telephone networks. The effort, specifically focusing on SS7 and VoIP protocol attacks, involves significant collaboration with federal researchers.

Network Attack Modeling and Visualization

This project uses distributed agents to synthesize vulnerability models and real time information from network discovery and intrusion detection systems. The prototype integrates the Starlight visualization system developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories to support interactive data association and model manipulation.

Network Vulnerability Analysis

This research is developing tools for scanning converged (IP-telephone) networks. The scanned information is integrated with an attack model database to support real-time vulnerability analysis.

Digital Forensics

This project is developing state-of-the-art forensics tools and techniques, including network scanners, IP profilers, chat room monitors and evidence preservation systems. In addition, hardware and software tools for recovering and analyzing digital evidence are being developed.

Policy Mediation

This project uses formal logic and mediator technology to implement meta policies for access control in federated database environments. This project involves collaboration with NIST scientists who have developed universal policy machines for generic authorization services.

Cryptographic Protocol Verification

This research has developed a formalism that integrates logic and process calculus components to support formal proofs about the knowledge and behavior of communicating principals, and about the properties of cryptographic protocols. The formalism also has applications to modeling and verifying security properties of distributed systems.

Programmable Security

This research is developing programming languages with constructs for programmable security. A primitive ticket based model is used to implement a spectrum of access control models (DAC, MAC, RBAC and TBAC), while supporting efficient security checking at compile time and run time. The Java language has been augmented with constructs for programmable security at the package, class and object levels. The project is also developing a coordination language with programmable mechanisms for orchestrating secure interoperation of software components, including legacy systems.

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux)

This project investigates strategies for effective SELinux access control policy management. Tools are under development to support SELinux system installation and administration. One effort engages information flow theory to establish techniques for access control policy configuration analysis. Another supports SELinux application development through syntax directed analysis of source code to derive complementary SELinux policy expressions.