TEGO stands for Trusted Electronics and Grid Obfuscation and means Shield in Latin. TEGO protects the system/network/information not only from outside malicious attacks but also from inside bugs/faults. The purpose of TEGO is actually to build trusted collaborative computing environments and applications which are highly secure and dependable by combining Security and Reliability using secure group communication and grid computing technologies.

The TEGO Center will be a cross-disciplinary and cross-institute research and education center, dedicated to fundamental and application research and higher education for the purpose of building a trusted and collaborative computing environment. More specifically, this topic covers the emerging fields of Cyber Security, Dependability, Grid computing, Autonomic computing, Database, and their applications in Medical Information and Health Care Systems, Tele-medicine, Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering.

Information and communication technologies along with society's drive for collaboration in the modern world make collaborative computing and its applications possible and even necessary. One typical collaborative computing example is digitized health/medical information systems in which physicians, nurses, researchers, health insurance personnel, etc. share patients information based on certain policies and access privileges and perform diagnosis and surgery collaboratively. President Bush has been calling for digitizing patients records for most Americans within ten years since April 2004. Another indication for collaborative computing is the recent wave for Collaborative Virtual IT World (from ACM article "Coming Soon...a Single, Global, Collaborative Virtual IT World (Phew!)" http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html#item9). Trust in this environment will eventually determine its success and popularity due to people's desire for privacy and integrity, like what is called "trust is the currency of the participation age," (http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html#item9). The current Internet is by design not trust-oriented. Security patches and enhancement mechanisms result in more security vulnerabilities. Compared to the two-party interaction model (i.e., the client-server service model), group-oriented environments involve a large number of users and shared resources and are complex, dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous, including even hostile elements. Systems experience failures due to faults and attacks from hostile entities including CYBER terrorists. More seriously, there are dangerous attacks from malicious internal members. Consequently, establishing trust among multiple entities in this environment is extremely difficult (much harder than establishing mutual trust between two entities) and is destined to become a grand challenge of the new century. Taking advantages of our unique combination and concentration of expertise, the TEGO center aims to establish an inter-disciplinary and cross-institutional research group on exploration and building of large-scale trusted collaborative information and networks systems and practice and promotion of distance education.


The Unique Features of the TEGO center:
1. it is group-oriented (collaborative) and based on secure group communication and grid computing technologies.
2. it integrates security, attack-resistance, and reliability all together to provide trusted services.
3. it is not only inter-disciplinary but also cross-institutional to benefit not only Computer Science but also many other disciplines such as Medical research and practice, Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering.
4. it focuses on critical applications which require high security and dependability. A typical example is health/medical information systems for which President call to implement within ten years.
5. it supports distant collaborative research activities and distance education practice.