http://www.fcw.com/pubs/fcw/1999/0503/web-army-5-5-99.html
MAY 5, 1999 . . . 10:48 EDT
Army to offer 'information survival' training
BY DANIEL VERTON (dan_verton@fcw.com)
SALT LAKE CITY -- The Army this fall plans to offer an online
graduate-level training course on information systems survivability,
teaching engineers to develop systems capable of surviving any kind of
technical glitch and network attack.
The new 14-week Infosurv course will be offered through the University of
Maryland as an online, distance-learning initiative sponsored by the Army
Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md. During the course, students with a
basic engineering background will build on their education with
instruction on reliability, security and performance risks that must be
addressed early in the life cycle of an information system.
According to Lt. Col. Paul Walczak, senior computer scientist at the Army
Research Laboratory, the concept of Infosurv has been around for about 10
years, growing out of research conducted at the Army Research Laboratory.
Survivability, Walczak said, can best be defined as a system's ability to
withstand hardware faults, software flaws, network attacks by hackers and
electromagnetic interference. When one of these types of failures brings a
system or a portion of a system down, the rest of the information
infrastructure must be capable of operating, he said.
"This is a serious attempt by the Army Research Lab to institutionalize
the concept," Walczak said. Until now, reliability, survivability and
security have been features that systems developers have "bolted on" after
the development process started, he said. The goal is to build these
requirements into the system design before development work begins, he
said.
The Army plans to transmit live courses each Thursday from a lecture room
on the College Park, Md., campus to as many as 16 satellite locations. "We
plan to beam this course out to as many sites as are interested in it,"
said Walczak, who noted that the University of Tennessee, Pennsylvania
State University and Harvard University also have expressed interest in
taking part in future courses.
Peter Neumann, principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory at
SRI International and the principal investigator for Infosurv research,
will be the primary instructor for the course. The course will act as the
core course in a new four-course masters-level certificate program in
survivable systems, and it also can be used as credit toward a regular
degree program.
-o-
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Received on Wed May 12 18:45:17 1999