Computer Science

Prof. Jun Li Awarded Grant for R&D of mSSL™

Assistant Professor Jun Li has been awarded a UO Translational Research grant to expand research and development of the mSSL™ protocol for secure download of multimedia and other content. mSSL uses a hybrid peer-to-peer paradigm and supports both data integrity and proof of service for data downloaded through the Internet. Li's grant is funded through the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Oregon.

The grant will support the development of mSSL middleware designed for secure content sharing, a prototype mSSL-based video service over the Internet, and monitoring software for testing and evaluation of the mSSL service. Prof. Li's mSSL R&D team includes graduate students, Wayne Manselle and Benoit Havret, and undergraduate Ian Gowen. A patent for Li's mSSL protocol was filed by Lumen IPS in August 2006. In addition, Prof. Li serves as a consultant to students in the Lundquist College of Business Technology Entrepreneurship Program who selected mSSL as a promising protocol for multimedia content delivery applications.

The mSSL protocol is described in several scientific publications by Dr. Li and was the topic of invited lectures at Princeton University, the University of Delaware, and Lehigh University. In addition to access control and confidentiality support, mSSL's contributions include a new design for data integrity and proof of service.

Dr. Li is director of the Network Security Research Lab and recently received a prestigious NSF Career Award to support his work in worm defense (see related story). Dr. Li joined the Department of Computer and Information Science in the fall of 2002 after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA (2002), M.S. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1995), and B.S. from Peking University (1992). For more information, please visit Dr. Li's website.