Healthy Body, Healthy Networks

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced 33 new projects through its Cyber Trust program, which promotes research into more secure computer systems. The largest grants from the $30 million program will go to two ventures that will look at new ways to defend networks.

The Security Through Interaction Modeling (STIM) center, which will receive $6.4 million over five years, will look at ways to create more effective defenses by studying and modeling healthy networks to see what distinguishes them from systems exploited by attacks, according to the NSF. The STIM Center will be based at Carnegie Mellon University.

The University of California, San Diego, will host the Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses. With funding of $6.2 million over five years, the center will look to human epidemiology to find a model of how Internet defenses are compromised by worms and viruses. It will also work to develop new capabilities for forensic examinations as well as techniques to suppress viral outbreaks on the Web.

Cyber Trust will also support a dozen new team projects and 19 individual and small-group projects, including methods of detecting tampered photographs and ways to protect against denial-of-service attacks.