The Hindu : Repaying a debt of gratitude to his alma mater

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Aug 14, 2003

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Repaying a debt of gratitude to his alma mater

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Aug. 13. Thirtythree years ago, he graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He proceeded to the U.S., to earn his PhD from the Carnegie Mellon University. He went on to head a California-based Network Security company which recently delivered, at five billion bits per second, the world's fastest solution of its kind.

And today, Prabhu Goel came home, to pay back a small debt of gratitude to his alma mater — with a $1 million grant which will fuel research and development in cutting-edge computer and Internet security tools.

The Research Centre at IIT Kanpur, named after Dr. Goel, was formally commissioned today. The team at the Institute is already working on advanced cryptography solutions — creating virtually `uncrackable' code — as well as developing tools like "PickPacket" which help intelligence agencies monitor sensitive network traffic.

"At the high end of the security spectrum, no country will share its cryptography work, since national security is involved", Dr. Goel told The Hindu over telephone from Delhi. "We have to develop our own solutions... and the team at IIT Kanpur is doing just that."

Headed by Manindra Agarwal, the group has already developed an electronic intrusion detection system for the Indian Army and another tool to help crack encrypted messages sent wirelessly using the new standard known as `802.11b'.

If the message uses a "key" that is 8 bytes or computer words long, they can crack it within seconds. If it is twice as long, it takes about 50 hours.Dr. Goel is currently Chairman of iPolicy Networks, a U.S. company founded three years ago. Their flagship product is "ipEnforcer", a scalable solution for networks, which kicks in with its security features at 5 Gigabits per second, without degrading the performance of the traffic.

"Almost all of iPolicy's solutions have been developed right here in India by a team of 50 engineers at our development centre in Noida", Dr. Goel said.

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