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.