 | Information and Networked Systems Security Research |
Current Research Projects
Research Collaboration
The Department of Defence and Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet - Secure Virtualisation Systems
The Defence Signals Directorate of the Department of Defence and Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet - SHINE Project
The Defence Signals Directorate of the Department of Defense - National Information Infrastructure (NII) e-security environment - Security Infrastructure and Management for Mobile and Wireless Networks Project
The aim of the research is to provide an understanding of the security issues associated with wireless and ad hoc mobile networks, to include aspect such as how to manage security and trust in a large scale environment, how to manage situations where there are multiple trusted authorities, techniques for identification and identity management in a decentralised environment, and secure access control and privilege management in the provision of e-services and applications.
Authorization in Distributed Systems
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Dr. Michael Hitchens, Chun Ruan, Sarath Indrakanti
Web Services Security
This research addresses the model, architecture and design of secure authorisation for web services. It achieves conceptual advances in terms of a flexible authorisation model, proposes a new XML based language, develops a comprehensive security policy management framework, designs a distributed authorisation service and demonstrates a practical secure web service system in .NET. It presents a new approach to formally reasoning about conflict resolution policies with dynamic delegation.
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Sarath Indrakanti, Weiliang Zhao, Dr. Michael Hitchens, Chun Ruan
Mobile Agents Security
Mobile agents are emerging to be a significant technology in networked computing and pose fundamental challenges in security, for which no suitable solutions exist today. The research project addresses the theory, architecture and design of secure mobile agents systems. It achieves key conceptual advances by proposing a comprehensive security model and a novel computational trust model for mobile agents. It develops new schemes for dynamic privilege management and offers new insights into the open research problem of protection against malicious hosts. It considers a novel calculus to formally reason about security properties and demonstrates practical secure agent based internet applications.
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Ching Lin, David Foster, Yan Wang, Vineet Pruthi
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Networks
As more and more business opportunities are created over the Internet, dealing with network-based intrusions and denial of service (DoS) attacks is becoming increasingly critical. The proposed research addresses systematically the theory and analysis of DoS attacks and develops new techniques and practical solutions to counteract them. We will investigate a hybrid method to counteract DoS, propose a new technique to identify malicious packets in the Internet to handle distributed DoS, consider a new approach using smart packets and develop enhancements to intrusion detection systems using data mining. Proposed techniques are analysed in practical situations.
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Uday K. Tupakula
Secure Peer to Peer Computing Applications
Peer to Peer (P2P) computing, an emerging paradigm, poses challenging security problems, due to its dynamic, decentralized and large scale characteristics, operating over untrusted internet, for which no adequate solutions exit today. This research will achieve conceptual advances in terms of comprehensive new trust model and metric, propose a decentralized trust management architecture and a novel scheme to evaluate peer trust in large scale federated environments. It will also develop new techniques for mitigating denial of service attacks in P2P systems. It will demonstrate them by building a practical secure agent based P2P e-commerce system, integrating results in security, information systems, networking and Internet applications.
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Dr. Michael Hitchens, Huu Tran
Secure Mobile Ad hoc Networks
Mobile ad hoc networks, a new emerging wireless networking paradigm, poses challenging problems in security, due to its dynamic nature and lack of centralized infrastructure, for which no adequate solutions exist today. This research addresses theory and design of secure mobile ad hoc networks. It achieves conceptual advances in terms of new security models for distributed location management, mobile authentication and multicasting; it proposes novel dynamic group key management and denial of service protection schemes, develops new security mechanisms for ad hoc routing, provides new insights into formal reasoning of security and demonstrates and evaluates practical secure wireless mobile applications.
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Doan Hoang, Venkat Balakrishnan, Uday K. Tupakula
Secure Group Key Management and Multicasting
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Dr. Yi Mu, Janson Zhang
Security Architecture for Mobile Software Applications
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, David Foster, Ching Lin, Dr.Yan Wang
Secure Electronic Payment and Internet Applications
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Dr. Yan Wang, Dr. Yi Mu
Trust Models, Trust Management Architectures and Applications
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Ching Lin, Weiliang Zhao
Formal Security Modeling and Analysis
Prof. Vijay Varadharajan, Chun Ruan, Yun Bai
Past Research Collaboration
Australia/India Collaboration - sponsored by Australian Vice Chancellors Committee (AVCC) Macquarie University/Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
As part of the DEST funded Higher Education Strategic Initiative - India, Macquarie University and the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) agreed to encourage academic cooperation through research and study in furtherance of the advancement of learning. The broad areas of common interest identified are Security, Networking and Distributed Applications.