DCKeyMgmt: Integrating Policy and Key Management for Dynamic Coalitions
In various collaborative environments such as alliances for research and development, health care, airline route management, public emergency response, and military joint task forces, autonomous domains form coalitions to achieve common objectives by sharing applications and services. These coalitions can be dynamic in that member domains may leave or new domains may join after coalition establishment. An increasing number of shared applications in dynamic coalitions (DCs) require secure group communication (SGC) services; e.g., conferencing, command and control, remote consultation and medical diagnosis, and shared instruments. Providing SGC services for such shared applications requires management of policies and keying material for groups that comprise users registered in different coalition domains. Policies specify the acceptable choices of cryptographic protocols and rules for group membership, while keying material includes both session keys (i.e., data encrypting keys) and key distribution keys (i.e., key encrypting keys).
 
Project Leads
Himanshu Khurana, NCSA

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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.