The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
The Center for Education and Research inInformation Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
I received considerable feedback from people who read the last post on the history of the COAST Lab. Several people asked for more history, and a few former students volunteered some memories.
I'll do a few posts with some specific recollections. If others want to send stories to me or enter them in the comments, we may document a little history. Eventually, I'll get around to the formation of CERIAS and some history of that effort.
In the earliest days, we had limited funding to apply to our research infrastructure; my priority for funding was student support. Everyone had an account on CS departmental machines, but we were limited in what we could do -- especially those requiring kernel configuration. Recall that this was in the era of 1992-1997, so neither "cheap" PCs running a Linux clone nor VMs were available. We needed access to workstations and a server or two.
I had contacts at several companies, and Purdue -- having the oldest degree-granting CS department in the world -- was also reasonably well-connected with vendors. I reached out to several of them.
HP stepped up to donate a workstation, but it was underpowered, and we didn't have the money for expansion. As I recall, HP at the time wasn't interested in making a donation beyond what they had already provided. Later, we also got a steep discount on an office laser printer. HP had some very clear divisions internally, so even though several groups wanted to engage, the ones with spending authority weren’t going to help.
I also recall donations of some Intel-based machines (from Intel). Other big vendors of the time -- Sequent, IBM, Pyramid, DEC -- indicated that they weren't concerned with security, so we got nothing from them. (3 of the 4 are now out of business, so go figure.) [Correction: in 1997 we were loaned a Dec ALPHA workstation for about 6 months, but weren't allowed to keep it. It was the primary computation engine for the work that led to the Kerberos 4 flaw paper.]
The company that helped the most was Sun Microsystems. (The late) Emil Sarpa was one of the people at Sun who took particular interest in what we were doing, although there were quite a few others there who interacted with us. (Mark Graff, head of their response team was one I remember, in particular.)
I don't recall if Emil was among our first contacts at Sun, but he quickly became an internal champion for us as their Manager of External Research Relations. He helped arrange some donations of equipment in return for (a) research results, and (b) access to potential hires. (That has long been the standard quid pro quo for collaboration with universities.).
Over time, including time as CERIAS, we received many workstations, a server, a lab of Sun Rays, a SunScreen firewall, and even some Java rings and readers. In return, Sun got quite a few reports of issues they could fix in their systems, and dozens of hires.
With upwards of two dozen machines in the lab we needed hostnames for all the computers. CS used names from the Arthurian legends for their machines. We knew that the CS department at Wisconsin used names of cheeses, one university (Davis?) used names of wine varieties, and there were other themes in use elsewhere. I decided that we would use the names of places from myth, legend, and science fiction/fantasy. Not only were there many candidates, but the idea of us working from places that didn't exist seemed like a good inside joke. (This also related to my long-standing interest in using deception defensively.)
Thus, we started naming machines after non-existent places: yavin, narnia, dorsai, trantor, solaria, barnum, xanadu, atlantis, lilliput, and more. We had a few disagreements in the lab when new machines came in ("I want to have Endor!"), but they all resolved amicably. I bought an atlas of imaginary places to serve as additional source material. We never really lacked for new names. Many of those names are still in use today, although the machines have been replaced many times.
COAST received a server-class machine from Sun in the mid-1990s. It had lots more space and memory than anything we had seen before, so naturally, it was named "brobdingnag." It became our central file server and mail machine. However, it soon became apparent that some of the lab denizens couldn't recall how to spell it, and petitioned for an alias. Thus, an alternate name in the host table came into being: "basm," for "big-assed server machine." A server named "basm" still exists at CERIAS to this day.
We decided to use a different naming scheme for printers and named them after Lands in the Oz mythos. Kansas, Oz, and Ix were the three I remember, but we had more.
A few machine names, in particular, have a story associated with them. One of the Intel machines we received was running Windows, and we named it "hades." (We were not Windows fans at the time.) A few years into COAST -- I don't recall when -- we attracted attention and support of Microsoft, in the form of David Ladd. He was (at that time) involved in academic outreach.
David was visiting us and saw all the Sun machines. He asked if we had anything running Windows. Someone pointed to "hades." He didn't say anything about that, but a few weeks later, we received two new Windows machines, fully configured. They went online as "nifilheim" and "tartarus." On his next visit, David quietly noted the machines. A few weeks later, two more showed up. I think those became "hel" and "duzkah." At his next visit, I observed that we were at a university, and I had access to scholars of history, religion, and sociology. I think we got a few more machines periodically to test us, but they all got named in the same scheme.
That isn't to imply that our relationship with Microsoft was adversarial! To the contrary, it was collaborative. In fall 1996, when Windows Server NT 4 came out, I offered a special-topics penetration testing class. About two dozen people enrolled. Under NDA with Microsoft, we proceeded to poke and prod the OS while also reading some of the classic literature on the topic.
Within two days, the class had discovered that NT 4 failed spectacularly if you exhausted memory, disk space, or file descriptors. By the end of the semester, everyone had found at least 4 significant flaws -- significant meaning "crashed the system" or "gained administrative privileges." We thus reported about 100 security flaws to the Windows support team. At that time, Microsoft was not as concerned about security as they are today, so we were told (eventually) that about 80 of the reports were for "expected but undocumented behavior" that would not be addressed. (Those numbers are not exact as they are based on the best of my recollection, but they are about right on the ratio.) That class provided several grads who went to work for Microsoft, as well as at least two who went to work for national agencies. I have not offered the class since that time as there have always been higher-priority needs for my teaching.
Over the years, many COAST (and eventually, CERIAS) graduates went to work at Microsoft. David --and MS -- remained supportive of our efforts until he moved into a new position well into the CERIAS days.
Today, various awards were announced at the 41st IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, including Test of Time Awards. One of the papers recognized was "Analysis of a Denial of Service Attack on TCP," written by a group of my former students -- Christoph Schuba, Ivan Krsul, Markus Kuhn, Aurobindo Sundaram, Diego Zamboni -- and me. The paper originally appeared in the 1997 S&P conference.
The paperreported results of work done in the COAST Laboratory -- the precursor to CERIAS. In this post, I'll make a few comments about the paper, and provide a little history about COAST.
When we received notice of the award, we were all a bit taken aback. 23 years? At the time, we were one of only two or three recognized academic groups working in cybersecurity (although that word had yet to be used). As such, we managed to attract over a dozen very talented students — including the other authors of this paper.
In the second half of 1996, several network denial-of-service attacks took place across the Internet. We discussed these at one of our regular lab meetings. I challenged the students to come up with ways to mitigate the problem, especially to protect our lab infrastructure. The first step involved replicating the attack so it could be studied. That only took the students a few days of effort.
After a week or two of further work, we had another group discussion that included the students presenting a detailed review of how the attack worked, using the TCP diagram as illustration. There was a discussion of some partial solutions that were disappointing in scale or efficacy. I remember suggesting that if they could model the attack as a state machine, a solution might be developed the same way — noting good and bad hosts.
Within a week, the students had coded a working prototype to test against our model attack. Thereafter, there was some extended tinkering and tuning, and a rush to produce a paper to submit to the conference. Purdue later obtained a patent (U.S. Patent 6725378) on the idea, although it was never licensed for use.
Thereafter, Christoph received his PhD in 1997 with work in firewalls and went on to a career leading to his current position as a Senior Security Architect at Apple Computer. Ivan received his PhD in 1998 with work on security vulnerability classification and he currently runs a company, Artexacta, that he founded in Bolivia. Markus finished his MS in 1997, and after completing his PhD at Cambridge, joined the faculty there. Robin finished his MS in 2017 and is now the Head of Information Assurance and Data Protection at RELX. Diego finished his PhD in 2001 with work in agent-based intrusion detection and is now an Enterprise Security Architect at Swisscom in Switzerland.
Purdue has a long history of being involved in cybersecurity. Notably, Dorothy E. R. Denning completed her Ph.D. at Purdue in 1975, with a thesis on secure information flow. She then became an assistant professor and offered a graduate course in Data Security, which has been offered continuously to this day as CS 555.
Dorothy was at Purdue until 1983. One of her notable students was Matt Bishop, who completed his M.S. and Ph.D. (1984) in information security on take-grant models. Matt has gone on to also be a major force in the field.
Sam Wagstaff joined the CS department in 1983 and took on the teaching of CS 555 after Dorothy left. His primary area of interest was cryptography, and he has had many notable discoveries and publications during his career at Purdue (Sam retired in 2019). He even has a form of prime number named after him: the Wagstaff Prime!
I joined Purdue's CS department in 1987. My primary research focus was in software engineering and distributed systems. I was involved with the newly-formed Software Engineering Research Center (SERC, an NSF-supported industry-university cooperative research center) at Purdue and the University of Florida. System security was a "hobby" area for me because there was not much of an interest in academia at the time other than in formal methods and cryptography. (I've discussed this elsewhere.)
In 1988, the Internet Worm incident occurred, as did my involvement in responding to it. Soon after that, I was the lead author of the first English-language technical reference book on computer viruses and co-authored the 1st edition of Practical Unix Security with Simson Garfinkel. I also was doing some highly visible research, including the work with Dan Farmer on COPS.
My work in the SERC had resulted in some great results, but I never saw them transitioning into practice. Meanwhile, my work in security had some immediate impact. Thus, I gradually started moving the focus of my work to security. This change was a bit risky halfway to my tenure decision, but it was what I felt compelled to do. I continued my work in intrusion detection and began research in software forensics (my work started that as a formal field).
The increased visibility of security also meant that some good students were coming to Purdue to work in the field and that some external funding started becoming available. Most of the students wanted to build systems-oriented security tools, but we knew there was potential for a very wide set of topics. So, Sam and I decided to form a laboratory within the CS department. The department head at the time, John Rice, gave us a room for the lab and encouraged us to seek out funding.
We knew that we needed a catchy name for the group. I threw it out as a challenge to a few of my students. Steve Chapin (now at LLNL) -- who was my first Ph.D. student in a security-related topic -- came up with COAST as an acronym for "Computer Operations, Audit, and Security Technologies." It also was a sarcastic reference to how funding agencies thought good computer science only occurred at the coasts. We knew immediately it was the perfect name, and we seldom used anything except for the acronym itself.
I, along with a couple of the students, played a bit with the desktop publishing tools of the day (recall, it was 1992) and came up with the logo: 
We knew that we needed funding to make the lab viable and keep the space. I approached several of the current partners of the SERC along with some other friends of the CS department to see if we could get some initial funding to support equipment purchases and support for the students. Four stepped forward: Sun Microsystems, Bell-Northern Telecom (BNR), Schlumberger Laboratories, and Hughes Laboratories.
We were open for business as of spring in 1992!
Over the next six years, COAST grew in faculty, students, and research, establishing itself as the largest research group in computing security in the country, reaching a peak research budget of over one million dollars per year (pretty good for its time).
COAST's success became notable for several innovative and groundbreaking projects, including the Tripwire tool, the IDIOT intrusion detection system, vulnerability classification work by Aslam and Krsul that influenced the CVE system, the first-ever papers describing software forensics by Krsul, Spafford, and Weeber, the discovery of a serious lurking Kerberos 4 encryption flaw by Dole and Lodin, and the firewall reference model by Schuba -- among others.
As COAST grew and added faculty from across the university, it was clear that it was more than Computer Science. Some of the CS faculty members were hostile to the work, dismissing it as "merely systems administration." (A few still have that attitude.) The CS Ph.D. qualifying exams of the time had mandatory exams in both theory of computation and numerical analysis (the department had its roots -- from 1962 -- in mathematics). Some of the faculty in those two areas were particularly unbending, and as a result, several very promising security grad students exited Purdue with only an M.S. degree. In retrospect, that worked out okay for all of them as they went on to stellar careers in government and industry, all paid much better than any of those professors!
Those factors, and others, led to the transformation of COAST into a university-wide institute, CERIAS, in May of 1998. I've discussed this elsewhere and may do a follow-on post with some of that history.
See some of the recollections in COAST, Machine names, Sun, and Microsoft.
