A paper co-authored by Peng Liu, Raymond G. Tronzo MD Professor of Cybersecurity in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, has been selected as one of the two winners of the 10-year Test-of-Time Award from the 2020 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) – a top conference in fault tolerance and dependable computing.
Each year, the Test-of-Time Award recognizes two outstanding papers published 10 years ago in DSN proceedings that have had a sustained and important impact on the theory and/or practice of dependable systems and networks computing research.
“I am honored and humbled to receive this recognition from the dependability research community,” said Liu. “I am very glad that the connections discovered in this paper between cybersecurity analysis and probabilistic graphical models have generated substantial impact during the past decade.”
Liu’s paper, “Using Bayesian networks for cyber security analysis,” was published in 2010, in collaboration with co-authors from Intelligent Automation Inc. and Kansas State University. The paper presents the team’s work to identify the important types of uncertainty modeling for cybersecurity and reports on using Bayesian networks to capture them for enhanced security analysis.
In the paper, which has been cited 228 times according to Google Scholar, the authors also report on an example Bayesian network they built based on a security graph model, justifying their modeling approach.
Liu’s research interests are in many areas of computer security, including building secure software systems, secure Internet of Things, and cyber situational awareness. He has published a monograph, 12 edited books and conference proceedings, and more than 300 refereed technical papers, and served as a program co-chair or general co-chair for more than 10 international conferences and workshops. Additionally, he has served on more than 100 program committees, has reviewed papers for numerous journals, is the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Computer Security (JCS), and served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). At Penn State, he has supervised or co-supervised over 20 doctoral dissertations. Three of these graduates now hold tenured positions at U.S. universities; six now hold tenure-track positions at U.S. universities.
Also at Penn State, he is the founding director of the Center for Cyber Security, Information Privacy, and Trust, and the founding director of the Cyber Security Lab. He co-led the effort to make Penn State an NSA-certified National Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education and Research. Since 2007, his researches have been supported by three prestigious DoD MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) grants, and he served as the Team PI for one of them.
At the College of IST, Liu was awarded the first Raymond G. Tronzo, MD Professorship in Cybersecurity in 2018 in recognition of his significant contributions to the college and to cybersecurity research. It is the third professorship established in IST, and the first created for the college since 1999.
