DHS to underwrite 5-year, $16 million advance of DETER cyber security testbed.

The US Department of Homeland Security has now signed a 5-year $16 million contract with the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute to expand and improve ISI's DETERlab testbed. The new project is called DETECT.

The DETERlab testbed provides an isolated 400-node mini-Internet, in which researchers can investigate malware and other security threats without danger of infecting the real Internet. It provides researchers from around the world with a controlled and safe experimental environment for scientific research. It also supports classroom exercises in computer security for nearly 400 students at 10 universities and colleges.

The DETECT contract will permit ISI researchers to expand capability and to advance the science of cybersecurity by developing, supporting, and evangelizing transformative methodologies and tools for advanced cyber security research, experimentation and testing. This will be achieved through extensions and enhancements to the existing DETER testbed, that will synergistically advance the capabilities of modern experimental infrastructure, the power and methodological sophistication of the tools it supports, and the community impact of the research that results.

According to DETER director Terry Benzel, "Under the previous work we advanced testbed technology creating cyberscience tools," and went on to note landmark studies such as a 10,000-node botnet experiment, and subsequent worm spread and multi-party experiments.

A significant thrust of DETECT will be outreach to cyber researchers and building a cyber research community. This will include helping other sites to use the DETERlab software system. ISI's federation extension to DETERlab will allow these new DETER testbeds to interconnect, to expand and diversify the research resources available to academia, industry, and government.

In November, 2010 the Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Interagency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Working Group endorsed the DETER cyber science framework. NITRD is a collaboration of more than a dozen federal research and development agencies.

"This project builds on efforts at ISI over the past six years and would not have been possible without the contributions of the entire DETER team," continued Benzel. "John Wroclawski set an ambitious research program; Ted Faber, Jelena Mirkovic and Mike Ryan developed and delivered new capabilities under that program; and Bob Braden crafted the proposal capturing all of the prior work and proposed new challenges."

Keywords: Computers, Information Technology, Software, University of Southern California.

This article was prepared by NewsRx Health & Science editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2011, NewsRx Health & Science via VerticalNews.com.