Jane Edwards
The University of Southern California’s information sciences institute has received a potential $800,000 contract from the Department of Homeland Security to research and develop new platforms that work to detect and report internet outages.
The cybersecurity division under DHS’ science and technology directorate awarded the contract as part of the Internet Measurement and Attack Modeling project in support of federal cybersecurity R&D initiatives, DHS said Friday.
“The work envisioned by USC ISI will trace disruptive cyber space events that affect multiple networks and organizations and deliver to system administrators and cybersecurity researchers the essential data they need to study these events and establish new defense mechanisms,†said Reginald Brothers, undersecretary for science and technology at DHS.
Under the contract, USC ISI will work to equip its “Retro-Futureâ€Â platform with new functionalities that seek to record and replace internet protocol version 4 outages to facilitate information sharing and study of network security events.
The university’s Retro-Future tool is built to track, replay and abstract domain name system, network packet traffic, routing data and other information streams.
