text: October 23, 2015 by Carolyn Warzon
  Dr. Nick Duffield, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and professor by courtesy in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is part of a group that was awarded a multi-million dollar contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to help develop new networking and security technologies at the Wide Area Network (WAN) edge.
  The awards fall under DARPA's Edge-Directed Cyber Technologies for Reliable Mission or Edge-CT program that the agency says will combine real- time network analytics, holistic decision systems and dynamically configurable protocol stacks to mitigate WAN failures and attacks on the fly. Its objective is to bolster the resilience of communication over Internet Protocol networks solely by instantiating new capabilities in computing devices within user enclaves at the WAN edge.
  The project is led by Applied Communication Sciences with partnership from Apogee Research, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Texas A&M University, where Duffield is principal investigator. The partners propose to develop Distributed Enclave Defense Using Configurable Edges (DEDUCE). DEDUCE is a new architectural approach to edge-directed network adaptation that incorporates novel approaches to sensing, actuation and control, creating a robust and scalable system that exceeds Edge-CT goals and evolves in response to changes in the network.
  Duffield's involvement in the project stems from his research in Network Tomography, in which end–to-end performance measurements between network edges can be correlated to identify common origins of performance degradation. In DEDUCE, this information will be used to inform strategies for alternate routing on an overlay network between enclaves. Duffield was a co-recipient of the ACM SIGMETRCIS Test of Time Award in both 2012 and 2013 for work in Network Tomography.
  Ponniah and Kumar publish monograph on designing secure protocols for wireless ad-hoc networks
  September 9, 2015 by Carolyn Warzon
  Jonathan Ponniah and P. R. Kumar, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and a co-author Yih-Chun Hu, have published a monograph on designing secure protocols with provable security guarantees for wireless ad-hoc networks infiltrated with adversarial nodes. The monograph is titled "A Clean Slate Approach to Secure Wireless Networking,"
  The authors note that the current process of designing secure protocols is tantamount to an arms race between attacks and "patches" that does not provide any security guarantees. Motivated by this, they introduce a system theoretic approach to the design of secure protocols with provable security as well as optimality guarantees.
  Ponniah is a post-doc who completed his PhD under the advise of Kumar who is a university distinguished professor.