Cyber Security Research and Education Center
Facilities and Resources
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The Computer Science department houses several laboratory facilities in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science on the campus of the University of Texas at Dallas located in Richardson, Texas. These laboratory facilities are actively used for education and research. In particular, the Security Analysis and Information Assurance Laboratory (SAIAL), Data Mining/Database Laboratory, Data Security and Privacy Lab, Semantic Web Laboratory, System Software and Security Lab and Computer Network and Security Instructional Lab cater to our research.
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The Security Analysis and Information Assurance Laboratory (SAIAL), a $1.5 million state-of-the-art laboratory, gives UTD the ability to conduct cyber security education and research, and greatly enhances our ability to collaborate with other universities and corporations doing leading-edge research in this critically important area. Founded in 2004, the SAIAL Lab is a major facility that faculty use for research as well as education. The lab consists of three separate rooms each individually tested to meet MIL-STD-285 TEMPEST standards. This lab is used primarily for Cloud Computing and Digital Forensics research projects. Some of the projects currently underway are Continuous query processing in large-scale social networks using a cloud infrastructure and Storage and Retrieval of Large RDF graphs using Hadoop and MapReduce.
Location: ECSS 4.101
Equipment: This laboratory has substantial hardware to support our research. The hardware we have at present includes four major clusters having different configurations.
The first cluster is very small in size and is generally used as our test cluster. It consists of 4 nodes. Each node has a Pentium-IV processor with an 80GB hard drive and 1GB of main memory. We use sample data in this cluster to test our code and carry out various optimization algorithms. This cluster is located in the Semantic Web laboratory.
The second cluster is placed in the SAIAL (Security Analysis and Information Assurance Lab with lab support) and has a total of 23 nodes. All the nodes in this cluster run on commodity class hardware on which Hadoop runs as well. This 23 node cluster has a mixed collection of hardware: 8 nodes have a Pentium-IV processor with 360GB of hard disk space and 4GB of main memory in each of them. The remaining 15 nodes also have a Pentium-IV processor with about 290GB of hard disk space and 4 GB of main memory in each.
The third cluster is also placed in the SAIAL lab and consists of 10 nodes. Each node in this cluster has a Pentium-IV processor with 500GB of disk space and 4GB main memory. All these nodes are connected to each other via a 48-port Cisco switch on an internal network. Only the master node is accessible from the public network on each cluster.
The fourth cluster to which we have access is the Open Cirrus testbed infrastructure from HP Labs. We can use up to 30 nodes from their testbed. Each node has a high-end configuration like a Quad Core Processor with 8GB of main memory and more than 1TB of hard disk space. We also have 2 solid state disks that will be incorporated into the already existing clusters.
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The Semantic Web laboratory focuses on several different projects in Semantic Web and its applications to real world problems. A few examples of past and ongoing projects are Large RDF stream processing using memory management algorithms, Ontology Alignment, Applying Semantic Web techniques to GIS and Developing Efficient Reasoning Algorithms.
Location: ECSS 3.220
Equipment: Computers with various configurations are available and used for different projects. They are configured with processors such as Pentium-IV and Quad Core, main memory from 1-9GB and disk space from 80GB-4.5TB.
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In the last couple of years, the UTD Data Mining/Database Laboratory has become a focal point for PhD research. This laboratory was partially funded by a SUN equipment grant. The laboratory consists of SUN servers, RAID storage, SUN workstations and PCs.
Location: ECSS 3.614
Equipment: The equipment primarily consists of two SUN Fire V880 Servers with a 900MHz processor, 4GB memory and 6-73GB disk space and a SUN Fire 280 server with a 900MHz UltraSparc-III processor, 1GB memory and a 36GB disk. The laboratory also has a SUN Blade 100 workstation with a 500MHz UltraSparc-IIe processor, 256MB memory and a 20GB internal disk, and a SUN StorEdge with 436GB disk space. Finally, the laboratory also consists of several PCs that run Windows XP.
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The mission of our Data Security and Privacy Lab is to create technologies that efficiently extract useful information from any data without sacrificing privacy or security. To achieve our mission, we are currently working on security and privacy issues raised by data mining, privacy issues in social networks, security issues in databases, privacy issues in health care, and use of data mining for fraud detection and homeland security.
Location: ECSS 3.613
Equipment: Six (6) Optiplex GX620 Intel Pentium R CPU @ 2.80 GHz processor 4 GB Ram; One (1) Dell XPS 435t/9000 Intel i7 @ 2.67 GHz processor with 8 GB Ram; Two (2) IBM x3500 8 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz processor 32GB of main memory; Two (2) IBM 4764 PCI-X Cryptographic Coprocessor.
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The S3 (System and Software Security) Lab focuses on building new systems and automated techniques to secure our computer systems (including OS kernels) and the running software. We cover a wide spectrum of technology including those from architecture, virtualization, operating systems, and compilers. Our emphasis is the underlying program analysis and reverse engineering techniques as computer systems essentially run programs, and we are particularly interested in applications which include the protection of the operating system kernel, the inference of binary code for vulnerability discovery and malicious behavior analysis as well as binary code reuse, the investigation of the cyber attacks such as intrusion detection, digital forensics, and digital data recovery.
Location: ECSS 3.612
Equipment:
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The CNSIL serves as our instructional lab for computer networks lab courses and hands-on cyber security lab exercise activities. The lab also serves as the homeroom for Computer Security Group (CSG), a UT Dallas student club that was founded by our IA scholarship students and other students who are interested in cyber security education. This lab is actively used by CSG students to conduct their extracurricular cyber security education activities. The lab also houses our computer network lab equipment which is used in the Computer Network Laboratory class.
Location: ECSS 4.619
Equipment: Two computer network equipment racks each containing four Cisco routers, four Linux PCs and four switches which are used for network configuration and debugging. The lab is also equipped with several PCs with different operating systems that students use for various purposes including teaching, research, and participation in cyber security competitions and capture-the-flag events.