NSF awards new grants

Two research centers that will apply life sciences techniques to Internet security are among 33 new projects the National Science Foundation will fund in its latest round of grants in the Cyber Trust Program.

A team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh will use ecology tools to better understand interactions within and between networks to identify malicious anomalies. A team at the University of California at San Diego will borrow from epidemiology to examine how worms propagate.

The two programs are among 33 new projects receiving grants totaling $30 million under the Cyber Trust Program. Other projects include methods for detecting tampering in digital photos, improving cyber-forensics tools, evaluating biometric identification techniques, and defending against malicious code and denial-of-service attacks.