Nicol paper on cybersecurity simulator receives 20-year “test of time” award

Last month, David M. Nicol received a “Test of Time” award at the 39th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS) for a 2005 paper he co-wrote with some then postdocs and students.

The PADS Test of Time award is given to past PADS papers judged to have had a significant long-term impact on the field of discrete-event simulation. Nicol’s winning paper, entitled “RINSE: The Real-Time Immersive Network Simulation Environment for Network Security Exercises,” describes the design of a simulator that was tailored for use in live cybersecurity training exercises involving hundreds of participants.

In work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the RINSE design tackled research problems that pertained to ensuring the simulator’s resilience, coherently merging network models with different levels of resolution, and integrating various forms of simulation and emulation with real devices.

Nicol—who is the director of the Information Trust Institute (ITI) as well as the Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in electrical & computer engineering and computer science and a Coordinated Science Laboratory affiliate—said that “RINSE has been the basis for twenty years of work at ITI in using computer modeling and simulation to evaluate security properties of critical infrastructures like the power grid.”

For example, the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) grant received from the NSF in 2005—which was the first of several large power-system trustworthiness initiatives for which ITI has become well-known—supported the continued development of RINSE and its application to the power grid.

In reflections on the RINSE paper, Nicol wrote, “In my own subsequent work at the University of Illinois, I’ve developed simulation/emulation-based technology for cybersecurity assessment of cyber-physical systems like the power grid, and have led the development of a cybersecurity exercise program for power grid engineers.”

However, the impact of RINSE hasn’t been limited to Illinois. Nicol noted that over the past twenty years, it’s become commonplace for simulations to be used in cybersecurity exercises. “There are internet-based cyber-ranges dedicated to using this kind of technology for training and education,” he said.

Nicol’s co-authors on the paper, Michael Liljenstam, Jason Liu, Yougu Yuan, Guanhua Yan, and Chris Grier, have all gone on to successful careers in academia and industry, and some of them have done significant work closely related to RINSE.

For example, Nicol says that Jason Liu—then a U. of I. postdoc, and now director of the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University—went on to develop a simulation-based cybersecurity evaluation program for Internet-scale networks. And Guanhua Yan—who worked at the U. of I. as a visiting student while completing a 2005 Dartmouth Ph.D with Nicol (who moved from Dartmouth to the U. of I. in 2003)—is now on the faculty at Binghamton University. Nicol says Yan has developed a simulation-based cybersecurity evaluation program focused on wireless technologies.

Liljenstam was a postdoc in Nicol’s group, and is now a Principal Researcher at Ericsson, where he has worked for over 18 years. Yuan completed an M.S. at Dartmouth with Nicol and is now at Supernova. Grier earned a Ph.D. at the U. of I. in 2009, and now works for Google.

This is the second time in two years that Nicol has won a PADS Test of Time award. In 2024, he and his co-authors, Matthew Caesar (a professor of computer science) and Jereme Lamps (who earned an M.S. with Caesar in 2015), were honored for a 2014 paper that described a way to add the notion of simulation time to Linux operating systems so that Linux programs could use virtual time to coordinate their executions.

Nicol wrote, “All of the authors of the 2005 PADS paper on RINSE are deeply gratified at having the longevity of our contribution be recognized.”