Building a model for generating HTTP traffic

Http headers have many fields and the payload can varying types of information: text, images, video, audio. Current statistical models do not include a lot of this information. Thus traffic generated based on these models does not provide the full width of traffic found in most networks.

Can polymorphic shellcode trick detection algorithms?

Polymorphic shell code is malicious code not easily detected. Its code is partially encoded and is decoded while it is ececuted. It can take many different forms. It can even try to model given distributions of characters in webpages. However, if several (e.g. 6-8) models are used to model HTTP traffic, can it hide from all of them at the same time?

Drawing and analyzing knots

An interdisciplinary, NSF-supported project with faculty from Mathematics deals with analyzing knots. Knots can be modeled as 4-regular maps and many interesting questions arise regarding how to generate knots, how to embed them in 3-space, how to determine a bound for their ropelength, how to cut them appart, how to draw them, etc.