CSE Colloquium: Indrajit Ray

Indrajit Ray, Professor, Colorado State University

 Title: APTRON – Active Perception for adapTive Response in cOmplex Networks

Abstract:

The computing landscape has changed drastically over the last several years. Computing is now a mashup of social networks, mobile networks, Internet-of-Things (IoT), cloud computing, cyber physical systems, and the traditional IT network. So has changed the face of cyber-attacks. Social engineering attacks that leverage the unsuspecting end user are among the most prevalent threats. Simple attacks on resource constrained IoT devices get amplified to large scale attacks on the Internet’s IT infrastructure. Anecdotal evidence suggests that we are waging a losing battle. How do we go about defining a better cyber defense framework under this changing landscape?

APTRON is an ongoing project that takes a mission centric view of computing and develops a formal methodology for quantitative security risk assessment and mitigation. In the APTRON model, a mission is abstracted as a complex network of networks defined by dependencies between various system activities, user activities, and resources. The continuity of the mission is more important than protecting the computing infrastructure on which it executes from cyber-attacks. End users become some of the weakest links that now need to be addressed. Interestingly, such a change in paradigm from the traditional asymmetric attacker-defender warfare, where the defender is trying to plug all possible security holes and the attacker is trying to exploit just one, enables a defender to proactively define and deploy defensive strategies in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. In this talk, we present the quantitative model that forms the mainstay of APTRON. This model allows the defender to articulate and reason about the dependencies between a mission’s cyber assets, the mission’s activities and objectives, the effect of various types of end-user on the mission, and the effects of a cyber-attack on the continuity of the mission. We discuss some of the risk mitigation methodologies that allow one to adapt the defense response to emerging threats.

Biosketch:

Dr. Indrajit Ray is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, where he leads the Software Assurance Laboratory and co-directs the Data and Applications Security research group. Dr. Ray’s area of expertise is Cyber Security with focus on applied cryptography and protocols, security risk modeling and management, resiliency of cyber physical systems, health informatics security, human factors in security, trust models, and privacy. He has worked in several multi-disciplinary research projects in these areas, including currently with researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory, Ohio State University and New York University in cyber security of nuclear power plant operations, with researchers in the industry in oil and natural gas security, and with researchers at the Anschutz Medical Campus of University of Colorado, Denver on privacy preserving search on encrypted health databases. His research has been funded, among others, by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Health, the Department of Energy and the Federal Aviation Administration. He has published over 130 technical peer-reviewed articles, book chapters in different journal and conferences and edited volumes, advised more than 24 graduate students, has served in leadership roles in numerous conference organizing committees. He was the founder and first chair of the IFIP TC-11, WG 11.9 on Digital Forensics, and a senior member of both the IEEE and ACM.