Planning Grant: I/UCRC for Security and Software Engineering

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

IIP 0969005 University of Illinois at Chicago Buy The University of Chicago at Illinois (UIC) is planning to join the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) entitled "Center for Security and Software Engineering Research Center (S2ERC)" which is a multi- university center comprised of Ball State (lead institution) and Iowa State Univesrsity. The proposed Center has a focus on improving the management of the software engineering process, the productivity of software engineers, and the security, quality and timeliness of software engineering products. The proposed Center (S2ERC) plans to investigate integrated methods of engineering practical software systems that are able to meet emerging security requirements in addition to encompassing traditional software engineering objectives. This goal is of great importance to both industry and government in order for them to be able to confidently deploy real-world software systems that meet their mission goals even in the face of a broad range of security attacks. Research activities within the umbrella of the S2ERC will draw on UIC?s traditional strength in formal modeling, analysis, and verification of concurrent systems. UIC plans to investigate various methods for managing the challenge of concurrency programming. UIC specifically intends to design and implement tools that will automatically detect and remove concurrency errors, such as deadlocks and violations of mutual exclusion constraints from programs written in high-level concurrent languages such as Java. UIC also intends to explore existing (sequential) software systems provided by industrial affiliates for the purpose of transforming those systems into concurrent programs. Finally, UIC will explore a set of techniques known as managed execution or run-time monitoring. The purpose of these methods is to transform a program in such a way that potential concurrency errors are monitored and avoided during program execution. The proposed Center will be an intellectually nurturing environment where discovery and understanding is advanced to its faculty, students and prospective members. The proposed Center will provide faculty and students the unique opportunity to work on research teams in real world security and software engineering applications. The proposed semi-annual S2ERC showcases will provide an excellent opportunity for all the students to interact with industrial partners and get a first-hand understanding of emerging challenges and opportunities in their careers. UIC plans to improve its level of diversity by reaching out to local high schools and middle schools. The UIC site intends to run summer camps on introductory computer science topics, for the benefit of students at these schools.