Invisible Armor
Stronger than steel but infinitely light and flexible, the mithril armor of Tolkien’s epic fantasy Lord of the Rings protected Frodo and Bilbo Baggins against attack by dragon and Orc.

In the real world, however, NCASSR researchers are designing a different kind of mithril to fight a different sort of dragon-cyberterrorists who have, in recent years, brought large, complex websites down by launching assaults that overwhelm ordinary security systems. Project MITHRIL, led by NCSA’s Von Welch, Jim Basney, and Himanshu Khurana, focuses on survivability— making it possible for sites to continue to operate and serve end-users in the face of a devastating cyberterrorist attack.


full story


Return to Feature Story list


The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research NCASSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is a multi-institutional cybersecurity research team. NCASSR focuses basic and applied research necessary to develop next generation information security technologies that address national cybersecurity needs. NCASSR is led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and supported by funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR).


SELS 0.7 released
Secure Email List Services (SELS) is an open source software for creating and developing secure email list services among user communities.
 
Strong community engagement strengthens cybersecurity research and development
NCASSR-supported exploratory research at NCSA and elsewhere has sparked additional external funding and development opportunities as well as successful deployment and adoption by users ranging from the defense sector to state law enforcement to the utilities industry.
 
NCASSR Collaborator Goes To Washington
Carl Gunter, a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science and a project lead on NCASSR-supported work involving adaptive, secure messaging, recently spoke to an audience of congressional staffers and lobbyists on Capitol Hill regarding ways to address a variety of critical cybersecurity issues in areas such as healthcare and energy distribution.