News and Announcements

The CoPS Lab has released the first public version (version 0.9.0) of the SAgent security framework for the JADE agent platform. This software is the first extendible software framework available for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of data that is carried and used by a mobile agent. Several papers have describing the design of SAgent and initial experimental results have also been released, and are available from the CoPS Lab web site. For more information, see the SAgent web page.

Tuesday, March 1, 2005: SCISS '05 to be held at the University of Texas at Austin

The third South Central Information Security Symposium (SCISS '05), a regional security symposium that started in 2003, will be held at the University of Texas at Austin on April 30, 2005, with a reception the night before. Submissions of one page abstracts from researchers in Texas and Oklahoma are sought, with full details, call for papers, and submission instructions available at the symposium web site.

Tuesday, February 1, 2005: UNT to compete in 1st Texas Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)

UNT has formed a team of 8 students to compete in the 1st ever Texas Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, to be held at the University of Texas in San Antonio. 2 students from the Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences in the College of Business are joining with 6 students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering to form a diverse team to meet the challenges to be thrown at them in this 3 day contest. For more information, contact Steve Tate at srt@cs.unt.edu

Monday, March 1, 2004: SCISS '04 to be held at Rice University April 23-24

The second South Central Information Security Symposium (SCISS '04), a regional security symposium that started last year at UNT, will be held at Rice University on April 24, 2004, with a reception the night before. Submissions of one page abstracts from researchers in Texas and Oklahoma is sought, with full details, call for papers, and submission instructions available at the symposium web site.

Monday, January 12, 2003: New UNT center devoted to information and computer security

The CoPS Lab is now affiliated with the larger Center for Information and Computer Security, a new university-wide center at the University of North Texas. The Center currently has 12 faculty affiliates, representing 4 different departments and 3 different schools and colleges at UNT. By coordinating efforts with experts in computer security and cybercrime in the departments of Business Computer Information Systems and Criminal Justice, as well as our own faculty in Computer Science and Engineering, we plan to build a comprehensive and organized effort to address both educational and research issues in computer security.

The center's first accomplishment has been obtaining two certifications from the National INFOSEC (Information Security) Education and Training Program administered by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Please see the Center announcement for more information.

Friday, April 25, 2003: Undergraduate class in Secure Electronic Commerce offered for Fall 2003 semester

Prof. Tate will be offering CSCI 4330, Secure Electronic Commerce, in the Fall 2003 semester. This course will cover aspects of secure electronic commerce, with emphasis placed on the technical security aspects of secure e-commerce software development. While the primary emphasis will be on technical aspects, we will also cover business and legal issues at a level that would allow a technical person to interact effectively with business and legal people.

Friday, January 31, 2003: Regional security symposium to be held at UNT on April 11-12

The first South Central Information Security Symposium (SCISS '03) will be held at UNT on April 12, 2003, with a reception the night before. Submissions of one page abstracts from researchers in Texas and Oklahoma is sought, with full details, call for papers, and submission instructions available at the symposium web site.

Monday, January 6, 2003: Graduate Computer Security class offered for Spring 2003 semester

Prof. Tate will be offering CSCI 5330, Computer Security, in the Spring 2003 semester. This course will cover the basic foundations and science of computer security, along with applications in current technology. The emphasis will be on concepts, but when possible the concepts will be illustrated through examples with real systems and practical security issues.

Monday, September 9, 2002: Fall semester underway with new class and new machines.

The fall semester is now starting its third week, with several exciting additions to the computer security work being done at UNT in the CoPS Lab. First, the CSCI 4330 class has begun with a full capacity of 20 students enrolled. This is a very fast-paced course that will use the CoPS Lab for lots of hands on work, and these students are getting a quick and deep immersion into security topics.

In addition, there are a total of 19 new machines available for use by the CoPS Lab due to the generosity of Intrusion.com (one of our industry advisors) and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Intrustion.com donated 12 machines, most of which are now remotely accessable machines on the "wild side" network. Two machines are Sun workstations, which gives us some architectural diversity in the lab, and several of the machines will be used for a special project. A grant from the National Science Foundation to support Prof. Tate's research in secure agent computation has purchased 7 new machines; the primary purpose of these machines is for work on that research project, but they will be utilized by other projects as well when they are available.

Monday, July 8, 2002: CoPS team places second in the Honeynet Project's Reverse Challenge!

A team from the UNT CoPS Lab has placed second in the Honeynet Project's "Reverse Challenge." This challenge simulates a real world security situation: an unknown program is discovered on a computer, placed there by an intruder. The challenge was to reverse engineer the program and determine the functionality and potential dangers posed by this program, which was in fact a real program recovered from a computer which had been broken into.

The CoPS team consisted of three Master's students, Vandana Gunupudi, Sandeep Nijsure, and Sachin Joglekar, along with Prof. Steve Tate, the lab director. A longer announcement, as well as links to the contest and more information, is available here.

Update: This was also covered in a UNT Press Release. The Denton Record Chronicle also put us on the front page of the paper for this -- see it here if you don't mind registering with their site.

Thursday, April 25, 2002: SELinux Type-Enforcement Policy Browser Released

The SELinux Tools project of the CoPS lab has released version 0.5 of tebrowse, a GUI browser for type-enforcement rules used by SELinux. This tool allows a policy designer to easily organize and filter type-enforcement rules in order to better understand the defined security policy.

Monday, April 15, 2002: Undergraduate Security Class Announced

Prof. Tate will be offering CSCI 4330, Computer Security, in the Fall 2002 semester. There will be a strong lab component to the course, and enrollment will be kept small due to limited lab space. So register soon!