Newswise — Researchers from Stony Brook University's Center of Excellence in Wireless & Information Technologies (CEWIT) have just secured $870,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the project entitled, "III-COR Medium: Collaborative Research: Achieving Compliant Databases." Dr. Radu Sion, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, principal investigator (PI) on the Stony Brook aspect, and co-PIs from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Arizona, will collaborate to develop secure regulatory compliant database management systems (DBMS) for financial, healthcare and governmental sectors. Stony Brook is responsible for key security and privacy project components. The grant award runs from 2008-12.
Spurred by financial scandals and privacy concerns, governments worldwide have moved to ensure confidence in digital records by regulating their retention and deletion. Today's information processing systems are fundamentally vulnerable to illicit behavior by resourceful and malicious parties. The recent apprehension and indictment of a world-wide data theft ring in the "largest hacking and identity theft case ever prosecuted" by the Department of Justice revealed the true magnitude of these phenomena -- over 40 million credit and debit card numbers have been stolen and misused.
"Recent compliance regulations are intended to foster human trust in digital infrastructures and, more broadly, in our businesses, hospitals, and educational enterprises," said Dr. Sion. "As increasing amounts of information are created and live digitally, regulatory compliant systems become a vital tool in restoring this trust and ferreting out corruption and data abuse at all levels of society."
In this context, it becomes more important than ever to strengthen the security of our information systems beyond traditional law enforcement using appropriate technological means. Consumers, corporations and governments from around the world must further develop ways to protect our sensitive personal and business information as well as detect those--whether here or abroad--that conspire to exploit technology for criminal gain.
This new funding is in addition to three existing NSF grants awarded within the past two years, including a $300K NSF-funded project under which Dr. Sion and co-investigator Dr. Erez Zadok are building strongly secure networked data storage mechanisms with confidentiality and privacy; a $500K NSF-funded project with UIUC to build a secure regulatory compliant data storage system with strong data retention guarantees and trustworthy indexing mechanisms; and, a $200K NSF grant, augmented by a hardware sponsorship from IBM, under which the Stony Brook Trusted Hardware Laboratory was established, which constitutes a central academic expertise and research knowledge repository on secure hardware " the first of its kind in the United States. The Lab supports community-wide educational and research activities, and provides direct hands-on or networked access to remote or visiting research community members.
In addition to being supported by the Stony Brook Trusted Hardware Laboratory, these secure data management projects are also supported by expertise and hardware available in the Network Security and Applied Cryptography Laboratory, and will significantly advance the state-of-the-art and help in the long term goal to restore societal confidence in the information-processing infrastructure.
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