Virginia Tech Cyber Education

Virginia Tech recognized as quality cyber security education and research institution by Deborah Frincke, Deputy Director for Research, National Security Agency.

  Silver Bullet Talks with Deborah Frincke (PDF | 1MB)

Virginia Tech Information Technology Security Laboratory (ITSL)

The Virginia Tech Information Technology Security Laboratory (ITSL) focuses on education and research in computer and network security.  Faculty, staff, and students work cooperatively on a variety of projects to enhance the security of systems and networks.  Co-located with the Information Technology Security Office (ITSO), the ITSL has the unique ability to leverage production data from university networks for research and testing.  The ITSL also relies on the advanced computer and network infrastructure of Virginia Tech and, in a close partnership with Communication and Network Services (CNS), uses the enterprise network for verification of designs.  Research projects in the ITSL are tested theoretically, through simulation and modeling, and practically, through the use of production data and network.

Current research efforts focus on security in the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), enhancing network security through a moving target defense, converged security visualization, and Bluetooth® security. Since Virginia Tech began IPv6 testing in 1998 and currently operates the third largest production IPv6 network in the world behind the countries of China and France, the ITSL is in a unique position to provide IPv6 security research.  One of the projects in the lab is a patent-pending Moving Target IPv6 Defense (MT6D) that exploits the large address space to prevent network attacks from being able to target systems.  Another project focuses on creating a converged security visualization tool for network attack and defense which merges geographic information with real-time network attack data and physical models, providing geographic information about the location of network attacks.  The security and privacy of Bluetooth® in mobile systems, particularly laptops mobile phones, has also been has also been explored through research projects.