The 72th lecture of “Tsinghua Information Forum” was held in FIT Building on Mar 21, 2011. Professor Yan Chen, Chairman of the Commission of Computer Science Education at Northwestern University, gave a lecture on “Netshield: Massive Semantics-based Vulnerability Signature Matching for High-speed Networks”. Prof. Chen first introduced the network security issue and the background of Network Intrusion Detection/Prevention System (NIDS/NIPS), then argued that state-of-the-art algorithms and systems cannot meet the exactness requirement of vulnerability intrusion detection in the real-life core network, after that he presented the systematic design based on semantics of vulnerability signature, and described the significant application value of the research by showing the performance of actual system test. Over 50 professors and students from SIST attended the lecture.

Prof. Chen received his Ph. D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley (UCB) in Dec. 2003, and joined the faculty at Northwestern University in Jan. 2004, now he is the associate professor of Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He leads the Northwestern LIST (Lab for Internet and Security Technology) and he is affiliated with the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security (CUCIS) at Northwestern. Prof. Chen’s research interests are in computer networking and large-scale distributed systems, network security, measurement, and diagnosis, as well as overlay and wireless networks. He won the DOE Early CAREER Award in 2005, the DOD (Air Force of Scientific Research) Young Investigator Award in 2007, and the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Awards in 2004 and 2005. His research is also sponsored by NSF and Motorola. Based on Google Scholar, his papers have been cited for over 3,600 times, and the h-index of his publications is 21 as of March 2011.