Computer Science Labs & Equipment

UCCS has secured a 1.25 Million AFOSR equipment grant to furnish a data center quality server room with three racks of blade servers and storage area networks and an innovation security lab to foster development of educational and research programs in Cyber Security, Physical Security, and Homeland Security. They are located in the new 150,000 square feet Science and Engineering Building completed April 2009. The innovation security server room will host three racks of blade servers with storage area network and 40 terabytes of storage. It will be used for

• the design and developed new secure network systems and protocols,
• the simulation or emulation of large scale networks for evaluating cyber attack and defense techniques,
• the configuration of networked of virtual machines/infrastructures for conducting capture the flag exercises and IA training workshops.
• the study of disaster recovery and network system restoration,
• performing multi-tier server cluster,QoS, Internet network research,
• conducting biometric and physical security research.

The 620 square feet innovation security lab will be equipped with high end workstation, tablet/laptop PCs, and wireless/sensor network equipment and development kits. It has Audio/Video connection to the innovation lab, the large conference room and the teleconference room of the National Institute of Science, Space, and Security Centers (NISSSC) with high speed internet connection to Internet for conducting cyber or homeland security exercises.

Justification for Server Rack and Server Modules

We need three server racks for disaster recovery, system restoration/survivability, multi-tier server cluster, Internet network research. It allows us to emulate how to reroute system traffic to the backup site, when one site fails, and to restore the original systems. It also allows us to investigate the design efficient secure storage network and secure collective network defense to allow network systems to function even when it is under attack. Each rack contains 4 high end X6250 blade server module each has dual quad core Xeon processor with 32 Giga byte main memory. Each of these high end blade server module allows us to run concurrent processes for demanding security related processing, or to run multiple networked virtual machines for cyber war exercises and different security research projects that requirement different system and application software configurations.

Justification for Storage Area Network

The storage area network with the provide Tera byte storage enables us to save large amounts of data expected to be generated by the proposed cyber security and homeland security research projects. The equipment also allows for virtual machines to access their file system images, and to access the existing cyber security knowledge base.

Justification for System software for managing the virtual machines on blade servers

To manage the large collections of virtual machines and servers for different security projects and to ensure the network configurations are properly configured, we need the VMWare Infrastructure with Lab Management software and related support.

Justification for cyber security software tool

We need this collection of security software tools to analyze the vulnerabilities in software server system.

Justification for the research equipment in the Innovation Security lab

The Cisco router/switch connects the blade server system, the PCs in the innovation lab and the campus network backbone. IDS and Firewall are needed to isolate and protect the networks. The workstations, desktops, laptops, all-in-one office machine, and wireless/sensor network equipment will be used by the researchers and students participated in security research and cyber war exercises.

Facilities and Equipment:

The DISCO Lab is located in the new science and engineering building. The server room is furnished with cutting-edge HP data center blade facility that has three racks of HP ProLiant BL460C G6 blade server modules and a 40 TB HP EVA storage area network with 10 Gbps Ethernet and 8 Gbps Fibre/iSCSI dual channels. It has three APC InRow RP Air-Cooled and UPS equipments for maximum 40 kWs in the n+1 redundancy design.

Research Interests 

• Compiler construction --- Program analysis and optimization for high-performance computing
• Programming languages --- High-level specification of domain-specific properties and program transformation
• Software engineering --- Automated code generation; systematic error-discovery and verification of software

More Information:

To learn more, visit Dr. Qing Yi's website.

About Media Integration and Convergence Lab - MICL

With new interactions emerges new ways of thinking --- MCIL is about communication using all forms of media and technology. Emphasis is to create tools supporting human interaction leading to emergence of new ways and forms.  Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary and seamless blending of ideas creating products is the focus to positively impact all of society.

More Information:

To learn more, visit the LINC lab website.

This is the main web page of Cybersecurity Research Lab headed by Dr. Edward Chow. Currently we have the following projects at different stages: 

• Enhance Security of Blockchain Systems
• Right Place Right Route Data Delivery(R2D2) project
• Proximity Based Encryption (PBE) sponsored by Northrop Grumman
• Software Defined Network Based TOR Network (SOR). Abdelhamid Elgzil
• Unified homeland security strategies through game theory. Rick White and Aaron Burkhart
• Cyber Resilience
• SCOLD: DDoS attacks and defenses
• SCORES (Smart Cloud Optimal Resource Selection)
• Tools and Techniques for Regulation Conformance
• Cyber Physical System Security. Jarret Rush.
• Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) Defense. Rodney Lykins.
• Trusted system and their application to security and Privacy in Cloud and Social Networks.
• Mobile Platform Vulnerability Analysis. Ehab Ashary, Abdulaziz Alzubaidi
• IDE for Secure Programming (possibly a new secure programming language?). Abdullah Sheneamer.
• Threats Theory and Their Applications. Sarah Pramanik, Abdelahmid Elgzil
• Privacy issues in distributed sign translation systems. Michael Mennozzi.
• Privacy by Design for Mobile Healthcare Applications. Arij Alfadi.

Facilities and Equipment:

The Vision and Security Technology (VAST) lab at UCCS occupies approximately 1800 sq. ft. plus an external server room. The lab has over a dozen multi-core servers, including a 48-core server with 512GB of RAM, and several high-end Nvidia GPUs suitable for deep learning tasks. The lab has over 60TB of storage, mostly in RAID configurations. The UCCS team also has access to the UCCS Cyber-security Datacenter, with a 128-core blade center with another 40TB of storage. The lab has accounts for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and access to XSEDE for larger scale computing, if needed.

Most student desks in the lab have dual-core or quad-core PC-class computers, though some students have laptops to simplify mobile / field work.

The lab has wide array of industrial research cameras as well as specialized cameras including multiple pan-tilt-zoom cameras and three camera-equipped mobile robots, including an early iRobot Packbot.  The lab also has a collection of camera-equipped smartphones and tablets.

In a separate lab space with ample room for user study experiments an OptiTrack external infrared tracking system has been installed.  This system can be used for acquisition of high-accuracy ground truth position and orientation measurements and head/body tracking for virtual reality experiments.

More Information:

To learn more, visit the VAST lab website.