Professor Spafford in the News

11-24-2003

Computer-Security Experts Challenge Researchers to Focus on Long-Term Solutions

Source: ACM TechNews

Purdue University's Eugene Spafford was one of five speakers at a recent Virginia conference who suggested strategies computer scientists could follow to implement long-term cybersecurity solutions. Spafford declared at a news conference that computer networks should be rethought to include embedded, effective, and easy-to-use security. However, he remarked that "Near-term needs are so pressing that they have soaked up most of the resources and most of the funding and left little for long-term thinking. It's an ongoing arms race in cyberspace."

Spafford, who predicted that better network security will encourage people to engage in more online activity and create better services, identified four "grand challenges" that researchers should address within a decade: The halt of spam, viruses, worms, and denial-of-service attacks; the development of tools to build large-scale, highly trustworthy networks; the creation of systems that give users the ability to comfortably control their privacy and security; and the design of risk-management analyses for computer systems that offer just as much reliability as financial investment risk-management analyses. Spafford also expressed hope that the federal government will allocate more funds to network security research.

Other speakers at the forum included Sun Microsystems' Susan Landau, who noted that medical care could be significantly enhanced if security and reliability were incorporated into computer networks. The Virginia conference was held by the Association of Computing Machinery and the Computing Research Association, while the National Science Foundation used the event to announce that it would soon start accepting research proposals for improving computer security under its CyberTrust program.

Purdue Prof. Christina Nita-Rotaru also attended this conference.

The complete story is available at the Chronical for Higher Education website: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Computer-Security-Experts-Urge/32545.

(Access for paying subscribers only)