Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) announced the release of five new products at the Electronics and Information Technology Exposition (ELITEX) '2008 organized by the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi during January 17-18, 2008. The five products, namely Cyber Investigation and Analysis Tools for Network Forensics, KYN - Know Your Network, Anuman- Real Time Weather System, Black Box and BOSS Server Version, were released by Dr. Shakeel Ahmad, Hon'ble Union Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology at the inaugural session of ELITEX 2008. Shri Nikhil Kumar, Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology delivered the keynote address. Dr. Ahmad also visited the C-DAC stall and evinced keen interest in the displayed products and solutions.

In tune with this year’s theme for ELITEX 2008 – “Securing Indian Cyber Space”, C-DAC’s newly released product Know Your Network (KYN) is an open-source based integrated platform exclusively for Network Monitoring and Measurement for diagnosing network health. KYN provides monitoring mechanisms for verification of QoS, network performance, diagnosis by analyzing various network parameters such as link statistics, interface details, latency, delay, packet loss, jitter, bandwidth utilization, application data rates etc. KYN also provides measurement mechanisms both using active and passive measurement strategies. KYN provides visualization model of various established public domain network tools such as MRTG, H323Beacon, Iperf etc. KYN integrates C-DAC’s Network Traffic Analyzer to identify intrusions based on network traffic behavioral detection.

Increasing incidents of cyber crimes and the need for equipping law enforcement agencies with the best tools for checking this menace has led C-DAC towards the development of Cyber Forensics Tools. C-DAC has already released CyberCheck Suite – disk forensics tools for acquisition and analysis of digital evidence. Over 100 licenses of this product have been distributed to various agencies across India. Now C-DAC has come up with tools for aiding network forensics and forensics of devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and smart phones. The former product termed ‘NetForce’ was released today by the Hon’ble Union Minister of State for Communications and IT. This comprises of NetworkSessionAnalyzer for analyzing and reconstructing network packets, CyberInvestigator for forensics analysis of various kinds of logs and EmailTracer for identifying the sender of e-mail. C-DAC has also come out with a package called ‘DeviceAnalyst’, which has tools for acquiring and analyzing digital evidence from PDAs and smart phones. With these set of tools, C-DAC is confident that law enforce agencies would be better equipped to tackle cyber crimes.

C-DAC is also displaying several other products from its R&D stable in relation to the theme of the event such as Face Recognition technology, RFID based Document Tracking System, Network at Guard, Network Security Concept Lab, Netra and so on.

Continuing to further its High Performance Computing legacy, C-DAC has added Anuman to its list of newly released products that will be made available on a commercial scale. Anuman is a fully automated workflow, which is flexible, portable and web based, and developed for regional simulations of the weather.

Anuman is an enabling tool designed to provide the user a real time forecast of weather parameters over local scale (sub urban region). The global model forecasts of atmospheric states such as Temperatures, Pressure, Humidity, mean sea level pressures etc are used to initialize regional weather forecasting models. These regional forecast models are then used to obtain the very high-resolution forecast of atmospheric parameters. The output obtained from this tool can be used for understanding the condition of the atmosphere over the region as small as 1 Km X 1 Km.

Anuman has a service-oriented architecture, which assists in predicting high impact weather events. The weather forecasts obtained using Anuman can be used for decision support in situations associated with disaster management, extreme weather event modeling, pollution dispersion modeling, aviation planning, agriculture forecast and maritime weather hazards modeling and also as a tool for the multidisciplinary research community. Anuman can also be useful for irrigation planning and to increase water discharge efficiency of dams.

C-DAC’s commitment towards bridging the digital divide with Free and Open Source Software has crossed another major milestone with the release of Bharat Operating Systems Solutions (BOSS) Server Version, which can be used in the Government departments as an Intranet Server. The BOSS Linux Server has several valuable features that includes a user-friendly GUI Front end that has Fire fox, Thunderbird and also supports printers and USB devices such as cameras. Presently it supports Intel and AMD x86/x86-64 architecture and is being tested on other architectures. Another key feature of BOSS Linux is the ability to remotely control the server. BOSS Linux Server is mainly targeted towards Government departments / SME’s and also towards Linux distro (distribution) developers for further development on Linux.

The Indian economy has witnessed a boom in the automotive sector with a number of automobiles on Indian roads expected to multiply manifold in the coming years; traffic snarls and more adversely, accidents are bound to increase as well. C-DAC’s “Black Box” for automobiles is a device that provides information on the circumstances in which an automobile may have been involved in an accident. The product enables us to judge the conditions, in which the vehicle was being driven, both from the point of view of the driver who was driving the vehicle and the investigating/controlling agency in case of an accident. With features like speed detection, alcohol breath detection, overload detection, front camera, etc and packed in a small unbreakable box that remains safe even after an accident, it can be very useful for the traffic police, transport department and also for automobile manufacturing companies.

Commenting on the launch, Mr S Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC said “C-DAC is increasingly focused on research that is technologically challenging, nationally relevant and commercially viable. To be able to fall back on our inherent capabilities and convert the technology into a product form has been successfully realized at ELITEX 2008 with the release of our products by the hands of our Hon’ble Minister. It gives me immense pleasure to inform you that C-DAC is traversing a diversified crossroad leading to multiple technical areas and I am confident that we shall surely continue to make our presence felt in the global IT market”.

C-DAC is also showcasing several other products such as Vehicle Tracking System, Intelligent Advisory System, WaterShed Game Project, E-Tongue, Electronic Medical Record Management System, Aid Management Platform, IP Phone, Bluetooth Modules, Tetra Radio, BOSS Linux and others drawn from its centres at Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Mohali, Noida, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram. Several of these products have been deployed in real life environments and have been widely accepted.