The Center for RITES
The center was established in 2005 to facilitate and coordinate both research and instruction in security and privacy at UIC. It is intended to be a centralized resource for students who wish to study computer security, faculty who are teaching and performing research in computer security, and industry concerned with computer security and privacy issues.
News
Recent news events
- August 2008: Dan Bernstein's port randomization has been has been hastily adopted by DNS software vendors. The adoption was driven by a demonstratated attack by Dan Kaminski at Blackhat; this class of attacks was discovered 8 years ago by Bernstein and a port randomization defense was implemented for djbdns (open source DNS software authored by Bernstein and used at over 2 million sites). Bernstein explains here that current defenses and proposals for their fix are inadequate and that new research is required.
- April 2008: Manigandan Radhakrishnan to defend PhD thesis on Monday, 28th April at 1:00 in 1325 SEO.
- October 2007: Prof. V. N. Venkatakrishnan and Prof. Jon A. Solworth receive teaching awards from the College of Engineering.
- September 2007: Prof. Daniel J. Bernstein is awarded an NSF grant on high-speed cryptography.
- August 2007: Prof. Sol Shatz is awarded an NSF grant on trustworthy online auction systems.
- August 2007: Prof. Sol Shatz joins the RITES center.
- August 2007: Prof. Yvo Desmedt will speak on From relative security to perceived security Wed., 29 August at 3:00.
- July 2007: Prof. V. N. Venktakrishnan is awarded an NSF grant on Runtime Techniques for Protecting Confidential Data in Large Scale Systems Software.
- July 2007: Dr. Carl Landwehr speaks on July 20th, 11:00 on Disruptive Technologies for Information Assurance
- April 2007: Dr. Thomas Messerges to speak on April 25th, 3:00, 1043 ERF on Security for Mobile Financial Applications.
- April 2007: Prof. Isabel Cruz joins RITES. Welcome!
- April 2007: RITES achieves National Center status! UIC was awarded National Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. Jon Solworth and V.N. Venkatakrishnan lead this effort.
- April 2007: Jon Solworth and V.N. Venkatakrishnan to present at the 3rd Midwest Security Workshop, held at Purdue.
- April 2007: Mike Ter-Louw has won a Mozilla Foundation Summer of Code internship for browser extension security. Mike's paper is being presented at DIMVA'07, co-authors are Jin Soon Lim and V.N. Venkatakrishnan.
- March 2007: Jon Solworth speaks at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- March 2007: Jon Solworth to Co-Chair with Ravi Sandhu the first Computer Security Architecture Workshop (CSAW). Daniel J. Bernstein is also on the program committee. The workshop is the first to focus on security architectures.
- January 2007: Mani Radhakrishnan (Ph.D. candidate), Satya Popuri (M.S. candidate), and Andrey Warkentin (B.S. candidate) receive Caterpillar Homeland Security Award of Excellence. Thanks to Caterpillar and the RITES selection committee (Profs Sloan, Sistla, and Venkatakrishnan).
- January 2007: KernelSec website launched.
- November 2007: Jon Solworth speaks at Georgia Tech.
- November 2006: Jeannette Wing was a speaker in UIC's Distinguished Lecture series. Prof. Wing spoke on attack graphs.
- October 2006: Ravi Sandhu was a speaker in UIC's Distinguished Lecture series. See abstract and slides here.
- October 2006: Added Chicago area security calendar (see top tabs).
Welcome
Welcome to the newly established Center for Research and Instruction in Technologies for Electronic Security (RITES). The purpose of the Center is to act as an umbrella for both research and education in Security and Privacy at UIC. The founding members of Center include faculty from the Colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences. As security is inherently a multidisciplinary field, we expect many other faculty to join under the center and participate in its activities. We are indebted to Dean Prith Banerjee for chartering the center, to Prof. Pete Nelson for his help and counsel in establishing the center and to Assoc. Dean Sol Shatz for his help in forming the center.
The center has been designated by the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency as a National Center for Accademic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. We are very pleased that our excellent and growing program in Information Assurance has been so designated. Our program now contains both undergraduate and graduate courses in both the Computer Science (CS) and Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science (MSCS) Departments with study in Cryptography, Network Security, and Systems Security. We have articulated specializations in the Computer Science degree at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The center fulfills an important research role, as it seeks to increase awareness of computer security as a discipline and serve as a point of contact with outside organizations. We are interested in collaborations within UIC and externally with both industry and government.
If you are a faculty member with teaching and/or research interests in computer security, we hope you will join our center. If you are a student at UIC with interest in computer security we hope you'll participate in center activities. If you are in industry or government, and have issues in computer security or privacy we want to work with you.
