SEAS aids U.S. security efforts

Homeland security research is now extending beyond U.S. government offices and developing in the halls of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Members of Penn's Computer and Information Science Department have been contacted by the government to contribute to homeland security efforts through a series of research projects to improve computer security nationwide in light of recent international turmoil. "This is an area that has become of obvious critical importance for the country," Engineering School Dean Eduardo Glandt said. Through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, members from different institutions are contacted and offered grants to lead various projects. As one of the leading institutions in the computer science field, Penn too is being counted among the organizations that are participating in the new wave of homeland security efforts. But computer protection is not by any means a new issue. When the PC became mass marketed, companies created machines that were more user-friendly but were lacking means to protect information. And now, the challenge is to balance the two factors without diminishing either -- to achieve this, four Penn faculty members are researching new ways to enhance security methods. "Our goal is to add security to open source software," Computer and Information Science Professor Jonathan Smith said. This way, it would be possible to increase the security levels, especially with the growth of the Internet and the accordingly increased traffic of information. Today, most companies and essential services operate through the Internet -- and if an outside source generated an excessive amount of traffic through the connected computers, the whole system would crash, causing considerable damage. Smith and his colleagues are now trying to prevent such a possibility. Their work is currently focused on Portable Open Source Security Elements, with the goal of improving the current state of the computers and making them less susceptible to outside influences. Smith and his colleagues are also conducting a second project called Scalable Trust of Next Generation Management. The project works on reinforcing the access control on the host to guarantee better security levels. When the results are finalized, the projects will become part of homeland security efforts to avoid disruption in such a "technologically sophisticated" country like the U.S.