Autonomic Information Assurance

With the phenomenal growth of the Internet, a new kind of threat, sometimes referred to as Information Warfare, has come to haunt the Department of Defense (DoD), which had come to rely more and more on the Internet for its communications and logistics infrastructure. The perceived threats range from innocent, inexperienced "hackers" causing no more than inconvenience all the way to malicious, sophisticated, organized attacks against the vital communications, economic, and military infrastructure of the United States. To protect the country against a potentially devastating attack, usually referred to as as "Electronic Pearl Harbor," the DoD initiated a bold new program aimed at endowing the information infrastructure with some kind of autonomic defense capabilitites.

The Department of Electrical Engineering--Systems (Prof. Jonckheere) together with the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences (Prof. Rozovski) of the University of Southern California were selected by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) as prime contractors--along with the University of California, Santa Cruz (Prof. Obaczka); the University of California, Santa Barbara (Prof. Hespanha); and the University of Delaware (Prof. Bohacek)--to lay down the theoretical foundation of making the network more robust against such treats as "eavesdropping," monitoring the network for intrusion detection, and, in case of  perceived threat, organize the defense in an automatic feedback form.

This research project, entitled "Advanced Mathematical Identification and Control Techniques for Autonomic Information Assurance," is subdivided into several  different tasks, which have somewhat evolved during the project, but which have consolidated in the followings:

Our group's specific contribution to this project consists of

Publications

  1. E. A. Jonckheere, K. Shah, and S. Bohacek, "Dynamic modeling of Internet traffic for intrusion detection," American Control Conference (ACC2002), Anchorage, Alaska, May 08-10, 2002, TM06, pp. 2436-2442.
  2. E. A. Jonckheere and P. Lohsoonthorn, "A hyperbolic geometry approach to multi-path routing," Proceedings of the 10th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED2002), Lisbon, Portugal, July, 9-10, 2002, FA5-1.
  3. E. A. Jonckheere, "Controle du trafic sur les reseaux a geometrie hyperbolique," Conference Internationale Francophone de l'Automatique (CIFA 2002), Nantes, France, July 8-19, pp. 109-114.
  4. E. A. Jonckheere, "Controle du trafic sur les reseaux a geometrie hyperbolique--Une approche mathematique a la securite de l'acheminement de l'information," Journal Europeen de Systemes Automatises (JESA), vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 145-159, Janvier 2003.
  5. E. A. Jonckheere and P. Lohsoonthorn, Geometry of network security, American Control Conference (ACC 2004), Boston, MA, 2004.
  6. E. Jonckheere, "Worm propagation and defense over hyperbolic graphs," IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2004), Atlantis, Paradise Island, Bahamas, December 2004, pp. 87-92, Invited paper, Session TuA03.3, Special Session on Systems and Control Methods in Computer Security.
  7. E. A. Jonckheere, P. Lohsoonthorn, and F. Ariaei, "Upper bound on scaled Gromov-hyperbolic delta," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, volume 192, pp. 191-204, 2007. (doi:10.1016/j.amc.2007.03.001)
  8. E. A. Jonckheere, P. Lohsoonthorn, and F. Ariaei, "Upper bound on scaled Gromov-hyperbolic delta: details of Surm sequence polynomials," addendum to previous article, 2007.
  9. E. Jonckheere, P. Lohsoonthorn, and F. Bonahon "Scaled Gromov hyperbolic graphs," Journal of Graph Theory, volume 57, number 2, pp. 157-180, February 2008; published on line 12 October 2007.
  10. E. Jonckheere, "Upper bound on scaled Gromov-hyperbolic delta: Four-point condition," in preparation, 2007.
  11. E. Jonckheere and P. Lohsoonthorn, "On Buseman negatively curved graphs", in preparation, 2007.
  12. E. Jonckheere and P. Lohsoonthorn, Coarse Geometry of Complex Networks, book project draft, 2006.

Ph.D. Dissertations

  1. P. Lohsoonthorn, "Hyperbolic geometry of networks," Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Electrical Engineerinf--Systems, University of Southern California, 2003.
  2. M. Lou, "Traffic pattern analysis in negatively curved networks," Ph.D. dissertation, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineerng, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, May 2008.

Sites of Interest