Our Mission
- Promote information security awareness
- Offer high quality education and research in security
- Foster collaboration between academia, industry and government
We are designated by the National Security Agency as a Center of Excellence in Information Assurance for both Education and Research.
Our Research
CIAE research led to the University of South Carolina’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research. We have maintained this designation by the National Security Agency since 2015. CIAE faculty and students are working in a broad spectrum of security topics and issues including the following:
- Developing methods for secure information systems centered on web-enabled data management, sharing and applications
- Access control models for web data and metadata
- Inference and covert channel analysis for open source intelligence
- Offensive and defensive activities
- Adaptable security policy composition for Service Oriented Architecture and cloud computing
- Correctness and reliability of Web Service Transaction processing
- Developing metrics that can predict our nation's vulnerability to cyber attacks and their economic, social, and legal impacts
- Social vulnerability and damage assessment models for cyber attacks
- Public health-inspired cyber security preventive approach
- National critical infrastructure protection
- Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems; cyber attacks against Programmable Logic Controllers
- Automated and adaptable response capabilities
- Intrusion detection by modeling a network's health as complementary views of the network's state and discovering anomalies and attack signatures
- Wireless network security protocols
- Cloud security involving authentication, integrity, privacy and availability
- Certificate privacy by new protocols to allow hiding a user's identity
- Investigating the main threats to the reliability of wireless communication
- Jammer localization using network topology information
- Jamming detection within wireless networks, including sensor networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET)
- Jamming-resistant multipath routing protocols that ensure highly available end-to-end packet delivery
- Discovering the security and privacy vulnerabilities of embedded systems and to improve their security
- Automobile in-car sensor networks
- The security and privacy vulnerabilities of automatic meter reading (AMR), including jamming to protect privacy
- Trustworthy analog sensors
- Inventing authentication methods that require little memorization from users and are difficult to duplicate by attackers
- Designing a new authentication method that uses emerging sensors to capture users' behavioral biometrics
- Designing a new password scheme that uses text actions to enhance password security against known attacks
Education Leadership
CIAE provides expertise in teaching that has maintained the university’s designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance and Cyber Defense Education since 2010. The Committee on National Security Systems and the National Security Agency (NSA) have certified that the University of South Carolina offers a set of courseware that has been reviewed by national level Information Assurance Subject Matter Experts and determined to meet National Training Standard for Information Systems Security Professionals as specified by the Information Assurance Courseware Evaluation Program of NSA. These courses, offered through the Department of Computer Science and Engineering are available to upper division undergraduates and graduate students.