Clarkson University Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chen Liu has been accepted into the 2015 Air Force Office of Sponsored Research Summer Faculty Fellowship Program to research cybersecurity.

The fellowship program is highly competitive, with faculty from across the nation applying to the research sites and the Air Force selecting only a few projects of interest to the organization, according to a release from the university.

Liu will attend the program from mid-May to mid-August at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Griffiss Business and Technology Park in Rome, NY.

"I will be working on cybersecurity this summer, and one specific problem we're looking at is malware detection in a cloud computing environment," Liu said.

Liu is researching a hardware/software-combined approach that monitors the behavior of virtual machines in cloud computing. "The monitoring would take place constantly and automatically on the back end to detect any malware intrusion on the virtual machines.

Once data is collected to create a model, Liu said, any deviation from the model will be used to anticipate unexpected behavior and report it for malware detection or other cybersecurity purposes,” he said.

"The challenge is, how do we build the model, and then to see how accurate the model can be," he said. "If there are thousands of virtual machines running at the same time, you want to monitor them all."

Program fellows conduct research in collaboration with Air Force researchers for a period of eight to 12 weeks in the summer at the Technical Directorates of the Air Force Research Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force Academy or the Air Force Institute of Technology.