REGIONAL CYBER SECURITY RESEARCH CENTREPlan of Action :
Setting up of the Centre Statement of Task : This project will involve a survey of the research effort in cyber security and trustworthiness to assess the current mix of topics, level of effort, division of labor, sources of funding, and quality; describe those research areas that merit federal funding, considering short-, medium-, and long-term emphases and taking third-generation capabilities as a starting point; and recommend the necessary level for federal funding in cyber security research. Contemporary explorations of cyber security issues by a variety of parties will be factored into this examination. Technologies and approaches conventionally associated with cyber security and trustworthiness will be examined to identify those areas most deserving of attention in the future. In addition, this project will also seek to identify and explore models and technologies not traditionally considered to be within cyber security and trustworthiness in an effort to generate ideas for revolutionary advances in cyber security. Structural alternatives for the oversight and allocation of funding (how to best allocate existing funds and how best to program new funds that may be made available) will be considered and the Board of Mentors will provide corresponding recommendations. The Board of Mentors for RCSRC shall consist of the following members : ADMINISTRATION 1. Mr. Lalit Sharma, IAS, Adviser to Administrator, Chandigarh 2. Mr. S.K.Sandhu, IAS, Finance Secretary, Chandigarh NASSCOM Mr. Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM Mr. N.K.Saravade, Director, Cyber Security, NASSCOM IT INDUSTRY Mr. Arun Seth, Chairman, BT Worldwide Mr. Prem Chand, Tech Mahindra Mr. Akhilesh Tuteja, TCS Dr. Vijay Gupta, Director, PEC, Chandigarh Dr. Bhaskaran Raman,A. Professor,CSE, IIT Kanpur Dr. Sanjeev Sofat, Professor & Head, CSE, PEC ACADEMIA Dr. Vijay Gupta, Director, PEC, Chandigarh Dr. Bhaskaran Raman,A. Professor,CSE, IIT Kanpur Dr. Sanjeev Sofat, Professor & Head, CSE, PEC Director, Information Technology, Chandigarh Administration shall be the Member Secretary for this Board for RSCRC. Plan Envisaged for Capacity Building :
At the very onset the RCSRC would begin its setting up in terms of Capacity Building.
We see the central aspect of "capacity building" as a shared effort among all those
involved in the programme to develop collectively our capacity for conducting excellent
research around the important set of questions that drive our programme The Capacity
Building will be categorized as follows :
Infrastructural Resources The Capacity Building in terms of Infrastructural Resources would be started immediately. The activities classified under the same are as follows :
Manpower The Capacity building in terms of Manpower will be accomplished through learning by doing. Training Training the manpower in existing technologies and new tools and strategies. The Training shall be disseminated at various levels which shall act as human resource for the conduct of the entire activities to be undertaken. The profiles can be :
Besides this, the Undergraduate and postgraduate students can also be induced in the Centre for carrying out Research & development activities. Besides other formal curricula they can be professionally trained so that they can constructively contribute in disseminating useful results. Extension Services Outreach, through collaborations that deploy our security technology and encourage knowledge transfer for both public and private benefits will be undertaken. Dissemination of information related to Cyber Security will be done aggressively to increase community awareness of security technology, challenges and solutions. Special Cyber Safety events shall be organized as a part of Extension Services to spread awareness. Research :To provide thought leadership to the nation and to the world among academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Collaborative research shall follow up so that academic researchers work hand in hand with industry researchers. Key research projects be identified based upon the manpower developed after the conduct of training mentioned above. RCSRC research shall improve our ability to design secure computer and network systems and protect them from attacks, enables people and organizations to form secure trust relationships across networked computing devices, and improves our understanding of the social, economic, and policy barriers to the development and deployment of such technology. The Center shall engage a multidisciplinary team of researchers and faculty and educate students in the broad field of cyber security. The Center shall focus on research in key technologies related to preparation for and response to emergencies at national, state and local levels. The RCSRC shall leverage prior applied research from military and civilian applications to develop new technologies unique to emergency preparedness and response. The research shall be geared toward the needs of first responders, incident commanders, emergency management officials and medical personnel. Drawing on the strengths from Computer Science & Engineering & IT, and NASSCOM the Center shall be a valuable regional and national asset for the development of emergency readiness and response technology.Proposed Projects :The abstracts of proposed Research projects that will be initiated in RCSRC are mentioned below :Project-I Title: Self defensive approach towards P2P worms exploits Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks enjoy enormous and ever increasing popularity both in real-life deployment (e.g., Gnutella and KaZaA) and also in the research community. While security issues for P2P networks have received attention, the main focus remains on ensuring correct operations within a P2P network in the face of failures and malicious participants. Examples include maintaining the internal structure of a P2P network and fair sharing of resources. The threats that a large scale P2P network deployment poses to Internet security have largely been ignored. P2P worms exploit common vulnerabilities in member hosts of a P2P network and spread topologically in the P2P network, a potentially more effective strategy than random scanning for locating victims. This project shall identify the danger posed by P2P worms and initiate the study of possible mitigation mechanisms. In particular, the project shall explore the feasibility of a self-defense infrastructure inside a P2P network, outline challenges, and evaluate how well this defense mechanism contains P2P worms, and reveal correlations between containment and the overlay topology of a P2P network. The project shall layout a number of design directions to improve the resilience of P2P networks to worm attacks. Project-II Title: Secure Wireless City The establishment of wireless city plays an essential role on such various government projects around the world. The challenge of this item is to provide valuable suggestions, including networking, security, and administration considerations, for building the secure wireless city. To provide a technical survey, the integration of heterogeneous wireless networks technologies will be investigated in and around Chandigarh. Additionally, current status and future trend of security considerations on deploying large-scale wireless networks will be analyzed. The following are tentatively identified as an area
Project-III
Project-IV Title : Security through analysis and measurement for wireless LANs With the rise of Voice over wireless LAN (VoWLAN), any complete WiFi security solution must address denial of service attacks, such as kicking off other clients, consuming excessive bandwidth, or spoofing access points, to the detriment of legitimate clients. Even authorized clients may be able to sufficiently disrupt service quality to make the network ineffective for legitimate clients. Our approach will provide a new foundation for wireless network security, ability to dynamically measure, analyze and protect a WiFi network against existing and novel threats, including rogue clients and access points, with a focus on VoWLAN use cases. Our goal is to support thousands of APs and clients, quickly recognize most new attacks, and generate few false alarms. Project-V Title : New Methods of Spoof Detection in 802.11 Wireless Networking The explosive growth of 802.11 networks has coincided with an increased presence of security threats to these networks. A large proportion of these threats are in the form of spoof attacks. Spoof attacks involve one device assuming the identity of another to perform malicious behavior. The available security tools to detect such behavior are quite limited. Current methods of sequence number analysis simply detect gaps in the monotonic incrementing series of sequence numbers in transmitted frames. However, these methods result in large amounts of false positives on wireless networks which experience even small amounts of frame loss. The unpredictable nature of environmental effects on signal propagation and a lack of signal strength stability due to calibration drift in low-quality wireless networking cards present significant challenges to using signal strength to detect wireless spoofs. A new methodology can thus be developed that can perform better detection and give less false positive rates than the popular tool: Snort-wireless’s MacSpoof. Project VI Title : Securing WLANs on top of 802.1x The project shall explore the practical problem of secure decentralized authentication and access control in wireless networks— WLANs (802.11 & 802.16). Many organizations are interested in securing connection access to their wireless (and wired) networks but the problem of accommodating guests continues to impede real deployments. This project will transform a working prototype solving this problem into ready-to-use technology that can be added to an 802.1x authenticated network. This project shall also explore a deeper problem: if the trust flow expressed by an infrastructure’s clever PKI does not match the trust flow the human organization requires, then the human users will find a way to achieve their goals that breaks the infrastructure. This project’s approach marries the security of standard X.509 PKI tools with the flexibility of delegation. As the implementation of the project progresses, more research projects will be added and also the scope of the existing ones will be enhanced. |
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