Advanced Technology Research
Undergraduate Fellowship Awards
Two Computer Science students have been awarded research fellowships for an 11-week summer program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Daniel Lessoff (Class of 2015) and Kyle Davis (Class of 2016) were selected from a large number of applicants from across the nation to participate in the NIST Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. The SURF program is sponsored by NIST and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Daniel Lessoff will be working in the area of computer security under the guidance of Mr. Oliver Borchert on a project entitled “Development of network diagnostic tools for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Security extensions.” Mr. Borchert’s research lab focuses on techniques to characterize the effectiveness and limitations of BGP robustness mechanisms. The BGP protocol, which is part of the backbone of the Internet, does not provide security verification of traffic. Daniel’s project will enhance the usefulness of the Wireshark network analyzer by integrating new functionalities to validate the security of network traffic. This is the second NIST-SURF fellowship that Daniel has received.
During the 2015 SURF program at NIST, Kyle Davis will conduct research in computer graphics and motion detection. She will explore using a head mounted virtual reality display into a system employing graphics and 360 degree video scenes in the project “Integrating the Oculus VR headset with Web-based 3D Graphics and the Leap Motion tracker.” Her mentor for the summer program will be Mr. Sandy Ressler, whose research lab focuses on information visualization and 3D web technologies for a variety of scientific applications.
Both students will be working in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST. The fellowship program is designed to provide hands-on research experience in a number of areas, including computer security, information access, software testing, networking, and communications technologies. The Information Technology Laboratory’s mission is to accelerate the adoption and deployment of advanced technology solutions. Certainly, the projects that Kyle and Daniel will be working on will help forward that goal! Congratulations to Kyle and Daniel for being awarded these prestigious NIST SURF fellowships.
Article prepared by Dr. Deborah Knox.
This project presents an approach to web application security that modifies general penetration testing tools to test for advanced vulnerabilities. As a proof of concept, the ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) security tool was extended with functionality to test vulnerabilities such as server-side security misconfiguration, to test CABECTPortal (a website housing collaborations between multiple disciplines). By combining the general vulnerability checks built into tools like ZAP and the server-side maintenance checks that are normally conducted manually by system administrators and programmers, this project provides a more tailored approach to security testing that can be applied to any web application, making testing easier and more precise.