Modern societies intrinsically rely on numerous IT systems, networks, and technologies for many of their core services including: critical infrastructure (power, water, etc.), eCommerce and M-Commerce, finance and banking, business-to-business systems, eGovernemnt and eHealth, etc. These systems are constructed via the integration of diverse and disparate technologies spanning increasingly global scales and they are increasingly difficult to engineer, particularly with regards to issues such as security, privacy, reliability, availability, scalability, etc. The InSPiRe lab pursues both applied and theoretical research in these domains and has close associations with several entrepreneurial ventures..

The InSPiRe labs seeks to address this engineering challenge in the broad domains of :

• Cyber-Security,
• Cyber-Privacy,
• Larger-scale software systems. e.g. clouds, etc.

A basic tenet to engineering is that something cannot be engineered if it cannot be measured, as underlined by Lord Kelvin,

" When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science." -- Lord Kelvin (William Thompson)

The common goal across all InSPiRe work is to strive towards quantitatively measured research results. This is a fundamental tenet of engineering solutions in enterprise-scale cyber-security, privacy, and distributed software systems.

Supporting this research is a purpose-build cluster-computing test bed facility dedicated to reproducing enterprise-scale network environments while meeting the full tenets of scientific control and repeatability.

This facility consists of:

• $500k+ in hardware
• an additional $250k+ investment in the R&D of its associated control/management software system.
  

Current InSPiRe Research Areas

The InSPiRe lab's current research activities cover a number of projects,

All of these research projects have at their core a strong focus needed to meet the tenets of rigorous scientific research and particularly the need to achieve quantifiably measurable results.

2003 - 2012 Information Security and Privacy Research (InSPiRe) Laboratory, University of Victoria