Xinming "Simon" Ou
Associate professor of computing and information sciences
Xinming "Simon" Ou, associate professor of computing and information sciences at Kansas
State University, primarily researches enterprise network security defense, with a
focus on attack graphs, security configuration management, intrusion detection, security
metrics for computer networks, and high-assurance software systems.
Ou directs research for the Argus group, the cybersecurity research group at K-State, and is a member of the university's Laboratory of Specification, Analysis and Transformation of Software, also known as SAnToS.
Ou received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2010, a five-year, $430,000 grant. His project seeks to improve cybersecurity by providing automated reasoning that a network administrator can use to reach a conclusion about what security breaches have happened and how they have happened. The project seeks to provide effective reasoning models and methodologies against an active, malicious attacker who tries to break whatever assumptions are made in the security model.
His research also involves keeping medical and military information safe. When these types of sensitive information are transferred between user domains, there is a danger of unauthorized parties gaining access to it. In March 2009, Ou and a team of other professors at K-State, in collaboration with researchers at Princeton University, received a five-year, $3 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The researchers are developing methods and tools to secure information systems so that when information is transferred across large systems, there is confidence that nothing is accidentally revealed.
Ou joined K-State in 2006 and was promoted to associate professor in 2012. He previously was a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security from September 2005 to May 2006, and a research associate at Idaho National Laboratory from May 2006 to August 2006. He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2005, and earned a bachelor's and a master's in computer science from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Ou can be reached at 785-532-6350 or xou@k-state.edu.
More information on Ou and the Argus Group is available at his homepage.
Pronouncer: Ou is Oh.