Kiyavash receives AFOSR grant to develop integrated cloud security system

Negar Kiyavash, a CSL assistant professor and the recipient of AFOSR’s Young Investigator Research award in 2010, has received a $20,328 DURIP grant from AFOSR to help develop a novel integrated cloud security system to enhance the future Department of Defense cloud. Kiyavash is a member of Illinois' industrial and enterprise systems engineering faculty.

Negar Kiyavash

DURIP, which stands for Defense University Research Instrumentation Program and is administered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is a program that recently awarded a total of $360,000 to nine projects investigators among six universities. The awarded grants are meant to significantly enhance projects related to the Department of Defense by providing necessary equipment for cyber security research.

In order to build this cyber security system, the researchers must integrate data capturing, data analysis and defense. Kiyavash will be focusing on the data analysis component by using her expertise in causal network forensics. The goal of the research being done at CSL is to provide computational capabilities to analyze large datasets that will be collected at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Louisiana Tech University through the implementation of an experimental cloud and cyber security monitoring system.

Kiyavash’s portion of the DURIP grant will also provide equipment for two different projects she is currently pursuing related to cyber security. The first project is titled “Information-Theoretic Causal Coordination” and the second, funded by her AFOSR YIP grant, is titled “Information-theoretic: Approaches to Network Forensics.”

The first project will investigate information-theoretic approaches to information fusion and will look at the fundamental problem of determining influences between data, which can be applied to network information forensics such as cyber threats and attacks detection. It will also focus on devising practical coordination schemes in rate-constrained environments that incorporate dynamics and feedback. The second project will characterize and investigate mitigation techniques for timing side channels that arise when a resource is shared among users.

A large portion of Kiyavash’s overall research will focus on developing statistical measures to quantify causal influences in a network environment.