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Security and Privacy

Prevention of Inappropriate Insider Activity (PIIA)

The aim of this project is to prevent inappropriate activity within a company or a country (such as preventing inappropriate access and use of company confidential information, or for a country, preventing activities that are a threat to national security). The technology will automatically analyze and discover patterns of activity that indicate inappropriate activities by way of secure, large scale link analysis data mining across disparate information sources. During the course of this project we will research and develop state-of-the-art technologies for automatic discovery of problem situations, appropriate visualization of knowledge gleaned from data mining, and secure to accomplish these goals.

The project started in 2004 and is expected to develop into the Information Security Group’s contribution to the “Knowledge Discovery Project” under the Canada/U.S. Public Security Technical Program (PSTP). This project is expected to start April 2007, and extend for at least four years.

Inappropriate insider activity in the broadest sense has to do with issues ranging from terrorism to corporate fraud. The ability to securely, accurately, and speedily detect and visualize inappropriate activities based upon data mining acros disparate data sets are amongst the most challenging problems facing countries and companies today. The solutions currently available in this area are inadequate and do not meet user’s needs. In addition, existing approaches often claim results in total disregard of the security and privacy requirements when dealing with data that may come from many different jurisdictions. Our comprehensive approach will provide effective safeguards against inappropriate insider activity and at the same time protecting the sources of information and privacy of those under surveillance. To date, the project has developed a prototype that demonstrates real-time visualization of work flow related to different types of activities related to computer operations.

Our research results, consisting of research publications, algorithms, protocols, and prototype software, and licensable technology, will have an impact on the ability of security intelligence analysts to be able to discover inappropriate activities related to terrorist activity more accurately and in a more timely fashion. We also envisage the results being incorporated in enterprise level software for preventing inappropriate insider activity, for instance, corporate financial information, and intellectual property. The results in this project will be applied to form further results in our SNAP project.

Research Contact

Larry Korba
Group Leader
Information Security
NRC Institute for Information Technology
1200 Montreal Road
Building M-50, Room 286A
Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Telephone: +1 (613) 998-3967
Fax: +1 (613) 952-7151
E-mail: Larry.Korba@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Business Contact

Dr. George Forester
Group Coordinator, Business Development
Business Development Office
NRC Institute for Information Technology
1200 Montreal Road
Building M-50, Room 203
Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6
Telephone: +1 (613) 993-3478
Fax: +1 (613) 952-0074
E-mail: George.Forester@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca