Prof. Salim Hariri

Salim Hariri is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Arizona.  He received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from University of Southern California in 1986, and an MSc from The Ohio State University in 1982.  He is the director of NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing and he is the Editor-In-Chief for the CLUSTER COMPUTING JOURNAL (Springer, http://clus.edmgr.com). Research interests include Cybersecurity modeling and analysis, resilient cyber resources and services, and high performance distributed systems.

Dr. Hariri is a founder of AVIRTEK, a startup Cybersecurity company from the NSF CAC center at UA. AVIRTEK received more than 3.6 million dollars in DoD funding to develop innovative autonomic cyber security products and services. He has lead the development of AVIRTEK AIM products that are currently being deployed commercially.
 

Title: Autonomic Cyber Security (ACS) – The Next Generation of Self Protection Systems and Services

The increased dependence on cyber systems in business, finance, government and education make them prime targets for cyberattacks due to the profound and catastrophic damage these attacks might inflict on our economy and all aspects of our life. It is widely recognized that cyber resources and services can be penetrated and exploited. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that the cyber resilient techniques are the most promising solutions to mitigate cyber attacks and change the game to advantage the defender over the attacker. In this presentation, I will present

an approach based on biological systems to develop autonomic cybersecurity technologies that will significantly change how we manage, secure and protect cyber resources and services. Our approach is based on autonomic computing (self-manage systems with little or no involvement from users or system administrators), data mining, and anomaly behavior analysis techniques. The main building component to implement Autonomic Cyber Security (ACS) are: 1) Innovative data structures (cyber-DNAs) to accurately detect current operational state of any cyber system and predict its behavior in the near future; 2) Anomaly Behavior Analysis (ABA) methodology that can detect with high accuracy and almost no false alarms any anomalous behavior triggered by cyberattacks, faults (hardware or software) and accidents (malicious or natural); and 3) Self-Management Engine to deliver automated and semi-automated actions so we can proactively stop or mitigate the impacts of cyberattacks. I will show through several examples how to apply ACS to secure and protect a wide range of cyber systems and applications.