The vision of AssurableNet Research Center (ARC) is to promote research and education in secure, robust and usable networking design, configuration and operations.  ARC was founded in 1998, formally named Security and Multimedia Networking Research Lab – SMNLAB, to provide high-quality research in the area of network security, network management and Quality of Service. The mission of ARC is to investigate novel techniques and tools to verify and evaluate network configuration, optimize network defense, automate fault/problem diagnoses, and assure service quality.

Application domains of particular interest to ARC Lab include firewalls, intrusion detection/preventions systems; security polices management; security evaluation; scalable internet and overlay network monitoring and correlation; IPTV and adaptive real-time multimedia protocols. The ARC Lab offers experimental testbed for School of Computing (SoC) students in many advanced network courses such as   Advanced Network Defense Systems (TDC588),  Multimedia Networking (TDC 573), Internet Engineering (TDC562) and Network Management (TDC568). The ARC Lab provides an excellent environment that attracts graduate and undergraduate students to conduct research during their master and PhD thesis. The director of the ARC Lab is Professor Ehab Al-Shaer . The ARC Lab also includes number of SoC faculty members and several Ph.D., graduate and undergraduate students.

Facilities: The AssurableNet Research Center houses 20-processor SunFire, more than 30 Sun multimedia workstations, PC Linux, PC Window NT/XP, and 5 IXP1200 Intel Network Processors Machines. Some of the Ultra Sun workstations are equipped with SUN PCI for supporting dual Operating Systems: Solaris 9 and Windows. The ARC also includes IOS, PIX firewalls, snort stations, and QoS routers for experimentation. The ARC workstations are connected with 100 Mbps network connected to Internet2. ARC is part of PlanetLab overlay network.

Location: The AssurableNet Research Center is in the School of Computing, Collage of School of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University : Office#802, 243 South Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60604, USA.

Support: The AssurableNet Research Center is supported in part by National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Aprisma, and DePaul University.