Threat Management

DHS awards Univ. of Houston $2.6M contract for DDoS research

The University of Houston was awarded a $2.6 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate to develop technologies to defend emergency response systems from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Researchers at the university proposed “a solution that leverages the cloud computing model by providing on-demand networking and computing capacities when requests suddenly surge”, the release said. They also plan to employ context-based automated smart interactive response (SIR) to verify the validity of calls. The project is part of the DHS S&T Cyber Security Division's Distributed Denial of Service Defenses (DDoSD) program.

The program focuses on protecting critical infrastructure and participants are asked to find ways to promote best practices, consider ways to defend against the largest possible attacks, and to anticipate potential targets and novel attacks.

Doug Maughan, director of the Cyber Security Division, DHS Science and Technology Directorate told SCMagazine.com that the University of Houston is one the eight participants that had been awarded a combined total of $15 million in contracts to conduct research and develop technologies for the program.

“Our end goal is securing infrastructure, both critical and internet, for our DHS customers,” Maughan said.

He also said that a total of $55 million has been allotted for research and development in the DDoSD, mobile security, data and privacy research, and cyber-physical system security programs.  Most of the contracts that were awarded for DDoSD and mobile security have been announced, contracts in the other two categories will be announced in October and November.  

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