Information Assurance Laboratory
The Secure and Robust Distributed Systems (SARDIS) Laboratory (Figure 3) is a significant research facility for faculty, staff, and students who are involved in information assurance research efforts. SARDIS enables researchers to identify and evaluate new technologies
on a variety of levels in support of security, reliability, availability, and performance applied to computer and information systems in distributed environments. This includes the study of
enterprise, grid, wireless, ad-hoc and ubiquitous systems. The laboratory is also dedicated for use in the IA educational programs of the university and in its partnerships with other institutions regarding both education and research.
Figure 3: SARDIS Laboratory Configuration
The SARDIS laboratory is designed to support the computing
needs associated with problem modeling and simulation as well as limited
scale experimental networks. Thus the system architectures are designed
to be flexible and adaptable. This includes both a production level
system and multiple localized clusters that could be reconfigured
to create a larger and more complex cluster of nodes.
Wireless and ad hoc capabilities enable faculty, staff
and students to investigate a variety of problems in this emerging
technology. Existing ad hoc laboratory facilities are typically limited
to a small number of machines co-located within a limited area. In
addition to building upon localized clusters the SARDIS ad hoc network
will be capable of demonstrating three-dimensional connections and
mobility of some network nodes (through the use of portable wireless
devices).
SARDIS also facilitates NSU research initiatives in
the area of information privacy. The research in privacy concerns
the investigation of technology for defining privacy policy models,
representation languages for privacy statements and implementation
of tools to support privacy policy integration into enterprise computing
environments. Initiatives such as Platform for Privacy Preferences
(P3P), Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) and A P3P
Preference Exchange Language (APPEL) a are a few of the areas that
can be used as research platforms to investigate effectiveness, performance
and tooling to ease their integration into enterprise environments.
Among the capabilities of the laboratory is a future
enhancement that will include access and participation in the Florida
Lambda Rail (FLR) project. Florida LambdaRail is a consortium of higher
education institutions who are cooperating to build a state-wide high-bandwidth
research and education network for Florida. The consortium is embodied
as Florida LambdaRail LLC, a Florida limited liability company. In
the near future the laboratory facilities will be expanded to include
Gigabit connectivity to the NSU FLR point of presence. In addition
to network equipment, SARDIS will increase its computation capacity
to become capable of participating in research efforts that include
high speed computing to support secure and robust GRID systems which
include remote collaboration, computational science and engineering,
and high speed network protocols.
Finally, in addition to enabling the simulation of a
range of distributed architectures a major innovation of SARDIS is
the ability to quickly reconfigure the various components to facilitate
the representation of a large variety of potential distributed architectures.
As new equipment and technologies are obtained the inherent flexibility
of SARDIS will serve as a valuable research tool for faculty and students
for many years to come.
