Institute for Cyber Security - ICS
ICS Labs conducts world class sponsored research on all aspects of cyber security in collaboration with leading academic, industry and government partners. Our researchers are world renowned for their special talents, skills and creativity in formulating intuitive and practically usable security models and architectures with rigorous formal foundations and analysis. Notable amongst these are the high-impact role-based access control and usage control models, and more recently models for information sharing. Ongoing projects include models for securing social networks and models for botnet detection and mitigation.
Our funding agencies include the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Our funded projects include collaborators from prominent Universities across the USA such as Arizona State University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Purdue University, Pennsylvania State University and University of Texas at Dallas. Our research is motivated by the two big questions in cyber security:
- What does it mean to be secure?
- How do we achieve the desired security?
Modern cyber systems involve numerous stakeholders with different, and typically conflicting, security priorities. Reconciliation of these multiple priorities and determining who will pay the costs and bear the responsibilities is at best an art today. One of our research priorities is to make this process more of a science. Another priority is study of how to achieve the desired security by use of existing technology where appropriate and invention of new technologies where needed. Progress on these two questions requires collaboration with researchers and practitioners in various application domains and security and cyber technologies. Our goal is to develop effective techniques for addressing these two questions in a large variety of application domains, and to transition the results into real-world practice.
Recent grants that we have won and are currently working on include:
- A million dollar Air Force grant on "Managing the Assured Information Sharing Life Cycle (AISL)". 9/11 caused us to reevaluate our "need to know" mindset to accommodate a "need to share" posture. What does this really mean? What are the implications? How can we share safely?
- A quarter million NSF grant on "Securing Dynamic Online Social Networks". Content, often including private sensitive data, is flowing into social networks at a very high rate. How do we introduce notions of privacy and security without impacting the velocity of data transfer and hindering convenience?
These are some examples of the many projects we are working on, and this site is regularly updated to describe our new projects.
ICS History
The Institute for Cyber Security was created at UTSA in June 2007 through a competitive $3.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. Prof. Ravi Sandhu, a world-renowned cyber-security researcher, scholar, educator and entrepreneur, was invited to join UTSA as the Founding Executive Director as a condition of the funding. UTSA awarded a $1.0 million Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair to Prof. Sandhu. The STARS program of the University of Texas System subsequently awarded a $1.0 million grant to Prof. Sandhu for furthering the Institute’s mission.
Cyber security was identified as an area of strategic importance for UTSA and for San Antonio in 2000. The Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) was established at UTSA in 2001. Cyber-security research and education activities were pursued in the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Business. Service and training activities were pursued in CIAS which was administratively independent of the Colleges. A vision for the Institute of Cyber Security was articulated in 2005 with the goal of unifying, strengthening and synergizing the already substantial cyber-security activities and expertise across the three Colleges and CIAS. A winning proposal to establish the Institute was submitted to the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, leading to founding of the Institute and invitation of Prof. Sandhu to lead it as a condition of the funding. San Antonio business, government and academic leaders were crucial to this process with special acknowledgement of the leadership of David Spencer. The Institute reports to the UTSA Vice-President for Research. The CIAS has become a component of the Institute.
