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Simon Ou awarded a $42,000 U.S. Navy STTR grant

October 8, 2019

USF Computer Science and Engineering Professor Simon Ou was awarded a $42,000 grant from Aptima, Inc. for a U.S. Navy STTR phase I project. The project titled “ALCHEMI: Attacker Learning in Cybernetworks using Heterogeneous Energy-guided Model,” entails conducting research on cyber attacks in the wild against Internet of Things (IoT) devices through honeypots deployed worldwide.

The IoT describes the interconnected nature of all of our devices to the internet and to each other. Security of these devices, and the information they have access to, is an increasing concern as IoT devices become more widespread.

“The number of IoT devices accessible from the Internet is growing exponentially and attacks against them have already wreaked havoc. In this project we are building a honeypot ecosystem and deploying it worldwide, so that such attacks can be trapped, observed, and analyzed. This will provide valuable intelligence as to how to protect those IoT devices,” Ou explains. The project’s duration is from July 1, 2019 to December 9, 2019.