A Secure Data Processing Infrastructure for Research and Education in IoT, SCADA and SGX Systems
Abstract
To meet the needs of our research, education and experimentation activities at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) for securely analyzing the massive amounts of data generated by various devices including industrial control systems we need a scalable infrastructure. In particular, we need an infrastructure leveraging the new technologies (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), SGX) being deployed in various industrial and battlefield systems so that we can prepare security solutions for new and future deployments. These technologies include the ubiquitous use of modern field and supervisory communication protocols and big data analytics enabled by new so-called edge computing devices. We have reached out to a variety of vendors and system integrators on industrial control systems and our requested vision for such an infrastructure is not available as a product from a single vendor, but requires unique capabilities to achieve the diversity of technologies we require. It combines variety of systems, including the SCADA system, multiple CPUs supporting Intel SGX, and GPUÕs, for distributed data analytics. Particularly, the SCADA system congregates multiple IoT devices. Data generated from these IoT devices will be used to perform secure analytics. With this proposed DURIP project, we will develop a secure and scalable infrastructure that can efficiently perform big data analytics that are robust to adversarial attacks while providing a cryptographically secure mechanism for preserving data security and privacy. UTD has built an exceptional team in Cyber Security Research and Education over the past decade with 100% success in NSF CAREER grants as well as multiple DoD YIP grants, among others. The researchers work in most aspects of cyber security including data security and privacy, software and language security, systems security and forensics, hardware security, cyber physical systems security, and data analytics for security applications. In addition to being designated as an NSA/DHS Center for Excellence in cyber security education and research, we also became the first university in Texas to receive the cyber operations designation from the NSA. We offer a variety of courses in most aspects of cyber security and have a robust NSF SFS (Scholarship for Service) program that educates US citizen students in cyber security. UTD is also one of the locations in Texas hosting ARL (Army Research Lab) South and we collaborate with researchers at DoD (Department of Defense), other government agencies and industry. We have assembled an outstanding team to develop the proposed infrastructure with the DURIP funds we are requesting. The resulting infrastructure will be a shared system that can be used by different groups within UTD, including the research and education activities of the PIs and senior personnel (who represent Computer Science) and researchers from other departments (e.g., in Engineering, Science, and Social Science) who have a need to process massive amounts of data securely, as well as our collaborators at the DoD research labs, our project partners and the industry. The investigators have also carried out extensive work on supporting women and minority students (e.g., from the African American and Hispanic communities) and host various workshops on Women in Cyber Security as well as in Data Science. Through these efforts we will give opportunities to students from the disadvantaged communities to carry out experiments with the proposed infrastructure. Upon the completion of the proposed project in two years, the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science will provide support to maintain the infrastructure for three years and we will make every effort to secure additional funds (e.g., NSF MRI) to enhance the infrastructure as new technologies become available.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 14, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1810249
Entities
People
- Bhavani Thuraisingham
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Texas at Dallas