The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
The Center for Education and Research inInformation Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
2017 marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the COAST Laboratory at Purdue University, and 2018 is the 20th anniversary of CERIAS. These efforts have resulted in one of the largest research groups in security in the world, with a historic number of PhD graduates and advanced projects.
This special issue celebrates these milestone anniversaries. Anyone who was a faculty member in COAST or CERIAS or who performed research there as a postdoc or graduate student is invited to submit a paper describing research in the focus areas of cyber security, privacy, and cybercrime investigation.
In many cases, private companies can do this much faster than the police. “A lot of law enforcement-based digital-forensics labs are just swamped,” said Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar, a professor of computer science at Purdue University. “Almost every type of crime—whether it’s homicide, arson, or a computer crime—is going to have some sort of digital evidence associated with it.” As a result, she says, the backlog of devices and data awaiting analysis at police labs can stretch from months to years.
One alarming academic article by Dheeraj Gurugubelli and Dr Chris Foreman of Purdue University sets out how a targeted attack on smart meters could potentially result in the shutdown of the power grid, disabling energy delivery systems. (They argue that “the compromise of even a single smart meter through focused attack or reverse engineering potentially provides access to the AMI network as a whole. This, coupled with the extensive use of multiple wireless technologies and geographic dispersion, results in an attack surface of unprecedented scale.”
