Sean Peisert

ACM Distinguished Member

Upcoming activities:

IEEE Security & Privacy (ongoing)

NSA SoS Best Paper Competition (annually, deadlines in April)

IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice (annually, deadlines in July)

NSPW 2025 (Aug 24–27, 2025)

NSF Cybersecurity Summit (Oct. 20–23 2025)

CSET 2025 (2025)

IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2026 (May 18–21, 2026)

Research

Intrusion Detection for High-Performance Computing

The goal of this research is development of a more mathematically rigorous anomaly detection framework, and its deployment to process control systems and supercomputing clusters. These goals are made possible by the domain-neutral metrics of information theory in tandem with the ε-machine model. This model, a special type of HMM, overcomes several limitations of traditional HMMs by inferring the model parameters from statistics of the data instead of relying on ad hoc assumptions.

Researchers involved:

Sean Whalen (I3P Fellow, UC Davis and LBNL → Columbia → Mt. Sinai School of Medicine → UCSF)

Deborah Agarwal (Co-PI; LBNL)
Matt Bishop (PI; UC Davis)
Sean Peisert (Co-PI; UC Davis and LBNL)

Sponsor: Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P)

Publications resulting from this project:

"Multiclass Classification of Distributed Memory Parallel Computations": Sean Whalen, Sean Peisert, and Matt Bishop,; Pattern Recognition Letters (PRL), 34(3), pp. 322–329, February 2013. [BibTeX] [DOI] [CDL]

"Visualizing Distributed Memory Computations with Hive Plots": Sophie Engle and Sean Whalen,; Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec), 2012. [DOI]

"Network-Theoretic Classification of Parallel Computation Patterns" (expanded version of CACHES paper): Sean Whalen, Sophie Engle, Sean Peisert, and Matt Bishop,; International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), 26(2), pp. 159–169, May 2012. [BibTeX] [DOI] [CDL]

"Network-Theoretic Classification of Parallel Computation Patterns": Sean Whalen, Sean Peisert, and Matt Bishop,; Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Characterizing Applications for Heterogeneous Exascale Systems (CACHES), Tucson, AZ, June 4, 2011. [BibTeX]

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Last modified: Friday, 19-Dec-2014 08:32:44 PST