SOL4CE Cyber/Cyber-Physical Laboratory opens at Purdue University

03-30-2020

Purdue University’s CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) has announced the addition of a new laboratory facility that dramatically increases Purdue’s cyber-physical research, emulation, and analysis capabilities. 

The first project deployed on the SOL4CE laboratory is research being conducted by Dongyan Xu, Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science and Director of CERIAS with researchers at Sandia National Labs.

“SOL4CE enables the research being conducted at Purdue to quickly and easily contribute to the work being conducted inside Sandia’s classified facilities,” Xu said. “SOL4CE is also serving as a platform for our emerging research and education in cybersecurity for cyber-physical systems, including advanced manufacturing and autonomous vehicles.”

The new SOL4CE (Scalable Open Laboratory for Cyber Experimentation) is a collaborative initiative between CERIAS, the nation’s oldest and preeminent interdisciplinary cyber/cyber-physical security research institute, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. 

“This new laboratory is a mirror of the facilities already within Sandia National Labs that have served as the platform for joint CERIAS and DOE research since 2017,” said Theresa Mayer, executive vice president for research and partnerships at Purdue University. “The opening of SOL4CE at Purdue allows us to increase both the speed and impact of our national security research collaboration with Sandia National Labs.”

SOL4CE is a resource facility, available to faculty and students across the Purdue University system, for quick modeling and simulation of cyber and cyber-physical systems. The laboratory also will facilitate extended experimentation of evolving systems and architectures for security, resiliency, privacy, autonomy and machine learning development and application.

“We’ve coined the term ‘emulytics’ to represent the new lab’s capabilities to provide high-fidelity emulation and large-scale analysis in a safeguarded virtual environment,” said Kamlesh Patel, manager of Purdue partnerships at Sandia National Laboratories. “By deploying the lab on campus, we look to grow the impact of our collaborative research with Purdue faculty, students and industry partners. This lab deployment aligns with a number of initiatives Sandia has been implementing with its network of academic alliance partners.”

Workshops are being hosted by CERIAS and Sandia to demonstrate the new lab’s capabilities and foster new research ideas. While the new lab’s primary goal is advanced research, development, and system design, it also will facilitate advanced curriculum development by Purdue faculty, and will be utilized by the DOE for gamification exercises to encourage students to pursue national security and cybersecurity careers.

“SOL4CE brings cyber emulation and analysis capabilities to Purdue that until now were only available in a handful of classified laboratories around the world, and only came about after a long history of delivering impactful research to the DOE,” said Joel Rasmus, CERAIS managing director. “We’re grateful for their long collaborative support, for placing this asset at Purdue, and for allowing other industry and commercial partners to collaborate with our faculty in the new SOL4CE lab.”

Writer: Brian Huchel, 765-494-2084, bhuchel@purdue.edu

Sources: Dongyan Xu, 765-494-6182, dxu@purdue.edu

Joel Rasmus, 765-494-7806, jrasmus@purdue.edu