Jim, Academic Speaking

I went to UC Davis for several years and obtained three degrees from there: BS (1993), MS (1996), and the hard one, Ph.D. (2000). All of these are in Computer Science and the last two were while I was a member of the Computer Security Research Lab. Around the time I graduated, UC Davis was designated by the NSA as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education.

My Ph.D. thesis work was on LaSCO, a language for specifying security policy constraints. My research advisors were Professors Karl Levitt and Raju Pandey. My thesis is available upon request.

I was involved in several other research projects while in the Security Lab. These include:

The large ARPA Intrusion Detection for Large Networks project. Most notably, I was one of the original people on the GrIDS project was was involved with that for 2 years. GrIDS is a graph-based intrusion detection system. The system is designed for scalability to large networks and represents network activity as graphs.
The Audit Workbench project. I worked primarily on audit trail visualization.
A project funded by Intel, researching the negotiation of security protocol options for networking.

During Summer 1997, I was employed as an intern at the Intel Architecture Labs in Hillsboro, OR. I worked under Dr. Baiju Patel in the Internet Security Technologies lab, where I conducted work on a policy language called SCIPAD for (among other uses) selecting IPSEC protocol options using ISAKMP.

The above and other degree work gave me a good background in information security (at least from an academic point of view), especially IDS. (NIDS was invented in the Security Lab a couple years before I joined.) My subsequent experience at Silicon Defense (2000-2003) and Symantec (2003-) has given me the practical view of NIDS that complements the academic background.

My curriculum vitae is available upon request.

For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that I was a TA for my first two quarters as a graduate student.

3 September 2005