14 DAY TRIAL // A cyber-security research center called the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT) officially opened on Thursday in the UK. Based at the Queen's University in Belfast, the center will develop new pieces of hardware that will allow better, real-time Internet content monitoring and automated CCTV analyses, as well as a new anti-malware engine.
The new center cost £25 million (around $40 million) and will receive government funding through agencies such as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Technology Strategy Board. Other funding will come from the Queen’s University, as well as big, industrial companies.
The partners hope that the technologies developed at the center will have commercial applicability. "CSIT has an excellent technology platform based on world-leading expertise at the University and its Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT). Our starting points are mission-driven projects for which we have identified end goals. CSIT also has a strong entrepreneurial ethos. We're confident that we'll be able to fast-track the development of marketable applications of our technologies to the benefit of UK industry and the wider economy," Professor John McCanny, CSIT's principal investigator, noted.
For the short term, the center will work to improve a new "high-speed data processor" called the Regular Expression Processor (RXP), which was developed by a partner company called Titan IC Systems. This product, which could be launched on the market next year, is said to be able to monitor Internet traffic in real time and identify malware, spam or other malicious activities with unprecedented accuracy.
The center will also develop the artificial intelligence required to increase and to perfect the data-analysis capabilities and extend the applicability of the original Integrated Sensor Information System (ISIS), already developed by the Queen’s University. This technology will be used to increase the effectiveness of the CCTV system by enabling the automated analysis of the data streams and identification of events.
Finally, in three to five years, the center plans to release new computer hardware that will be able to process data between 100 and 10,000 times faster than content-processing solutions already on the market at the moment. "Because conventional processor technology can only deal with information character by character, it's far too slow to analyse internet traffic in real time," the project's leader, Dr. Sakir Sezer, noted.
"We're developing parallel processors which can be scaled to process up to 32 characters (256-bit) at once, making real-time inspection of huge data volumes possible for the first time ever. Network providers will be able to install and use this technology to provide much better protection for internet users, as well as advanced user experience (i.e. quality of service), and efficient utilisation/management of network resources," he explained.