The recent prevalence of advanced cyber attacks has caused enterprise breaches with severe consequences in critical sectors, such as national defense, manufacturing and the financial industry. Current defense practices rely on attack prevention and detection technologies, but our understanding of the capabilities of these security tools against truly advanced threats, which rapidly grow in sophistication, is severely lacking. This project seeks to harden enterprise security against advanced threats by systematically designing a new multi-layer intrusion-resilient framework that addresses individual enterprise defenses, as well as global, community-based protections. Overall, with a focus on educational activities, outreach to under-represented minority groups and technology transfer to industry, this project aims at contributing a new holistic defense approach to the security community that increases the security stance of our national infrastructures.
This project develops a new framework for enterprise intrusion resilience that: (1) protects both individual assets and enterprises as a whole; (2) adapts to attacker's strategies by devising security tools that are themselves resilient to breaches; and (3) promotes new coordinated protections across enterprises and industry sectors while protecting the privacy of shared data. These solutions leverage cryptography, game-theoretical modeling, and community-based defenses to provide strong intrusion resilience against advanced threats. The investigators plan to engage actively with the security industry to evaluate their techniques in practical settings and provide concrete recommendations on local and coordinated defensive strategies for protecting our national infrastructures. By educating students and cyber professionals, as well as conducting a range of outreach activities to the community, this project seeks to increase awareness of emerging attack techniques and best proactive defenses for successfully mitigating the cyber attacks of the future.
