The Department of Defense (DoD) awarded Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) $432,854 to enhance its research and teaching capability in Cybersecurity. The project will support PVAMU acquiring a major Cybersecurity Testing Equipment/System (Spirent-CF20 CyberFlood) to improve and accelerate research and classroom teaching in cybersecurity and network engineering.
“To effectively combat cyber-attacks, it is necessary to study the attack vectors, investigate the security issues, develop new security models, and investigate cybersecurity management for various interconnected cyber systems,” said Research Scientist and Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Shumon Alam. Co-PI, Dr. Suxia Cui, will focus on intrusion detection using artificial intelligence (AI) while the second Co-PI, Dr. Sarhan Musa, will work on Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) based Network Architecture.
The CF20 allows testing of the network’s vulnerability and performance metrics in terms of network/web infrastructure in depth. The system comes with a TestCloud of thousands of malicious up-to-date attack vector’s database. The proposed system/equipment will remove the researchers’ limitations in testing new solutions to cybersecurity/network engineering and enhance the research capability and knowledge gap in education. The research team seeks solutions to network intrusion detection and prevention system, various cyber-attacks such as the zero-day attack, distributed denial of service (DDOS), a man-in-the-middle attack (MMA), profile testing, and other critical issues for cyberinfrastructure.
Successful completion of the project will provide comprehensive and rigorous modeling of network and cybersecurity solutions. The outcome will be aligned with the educational module at the undergraduate and graduate level to improve the cybersecurity learning experiences. On a broader scale, this project will (i) improve the research capability and increase the engagement of underrepresented students in Cybersecurity research, (ii) motivate undergraduates to pursue in graduate studies in STEM fields and (iii) promote minority students to pursue a career in STEM-related fields especially in cybersecurity.
The award is the result of a merit competition administered by the Army Research Office under policy and guidance of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)). The Army Research Office is an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory.