Computer data breaches cost companies millions of dollars each year. When combined with the damage leaks of private information do to consumers, the total cost of security issues is even greater. Many systems, including blockchains and Internet of Things systems, are created secure at the design level. However, mistakes in their implementation of those systems often make them vulnerable. Dimitris E. Simos, SBA Research’s MATRIS Group Leader and his partner Jeff Lei of University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), are the two PIs in a recently awarded three-year $585,000 grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA to develop a new approach to security testing of blockchains and Internet of Things systems aiming to avoid these vulnerabilities.
The funded project, called SENTINEL, will use combinatorial interaction testing technologies to perform general testing, and also to expands the horizons of the combinatorial security testing research program put forth from SBA Research (Dimitris E. Simos), NIST (Raghu Kacker, Rick Kuhn) and UTA (Jeff Lei).