A pair of Ball State professors is leading a multi-university team to help the U.S. Army find ways to assess the reliability and security of its digitized communication systems during land warfare.

Computer science professors Wayne and Dolores Zage are heading up "SMART: Security Measurements and Assuring Reliability through Metrics Technology." The project is being funded by a $939,000 grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Along with the Zages, faculty from Ball State, the University of Illinois-Chicago and Purdue University, are investigating how to identify and visualize software vulnerabilities to reduce potential tampering of computer software.

"To put it simply, we'll be looking for potential trouble spots, including defects in coding, when it comes to reliability and security in networked computer systems," Wayne Zage said. "In the future, battlefield operations will depend heavily on networked computing systems that link resources from various locations around the globe, operating on various platforms, into a cohesive fighting force."

Such complex and widely dispersed operations can expose the network-based systems to unprecedented levels of reliability and security risks, he said.

The research may be critical to battlefields of the future because the U.S. military is currently testing hand-held computers that link soldiers to command and control systems far from the battlefield, Dolores Zage said.

"The military doesn't want someone to break into the system during the middle of a battle," she said. "Being able to assess the security and reliability of these systems is essential to the overall mission of the U.S. military."

The Zages plan to use their experience in design metrics, coupled with research in reliability metrics and the extensive technical resources of the National Science Foundation's Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) located at Ball State, to address the theoretical and technological underpinnings of widely dispersed network-centric software.

The project is a continuation of a 20-year relationship between the Zages and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

 (Note to Editors: For more information, contact Wayne Zage at wmzage@bsu.edu or (765) 285-8664. Michael Fluharty, public affairs director for the Army Research Laboratory, may be contacted at (301) 394-1178.)