Xusheng Xiao and Yinghui Wu, both assistant professors in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences, recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project “SaTC: CORE: Small: Scalable Cyber Attack Investigation using Declarative Queries and Interrogative Analysis.” The grant amounts to $499,979, which the NSF will use to sponsor Xiao’s and Wu’s research over the course of three years. 

Recent cyber attacks that exploit multiple vulnerabilities plague even the most protected companies. This has led to the solutions that ubiquitously monitor system activities as a series of system events, and apply causality analysis to reveal the attack steps through reconstructing the events and their dependencies on the attack as dependency graphs.

The goal of Xiao’s and Wu’s research is to improve on existing security techniques and to make an impact on system security by enhancing attack investigation using system audit logs and providing contextual information to help intrusion detection systems better prioritize alerts.

Read more about Xiao’s and Wu’s research.