NSA broadens funding for 4 universities to advance the science of cybersecurity

NSA broadens funding for 4 universities to advance the science of cybersecurity

The National Security Agency is expanding funding for several universities to continue scientific research into cyber security.

The intelligence agency awarded contracts to North Carolina State University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and recently announced that these three universities along with the University of Maryland would receive additional funding.

NSA’s initial 2012 funding to the three universities lasts through June 2014, reports Federal Computer Week. The most recent funding for all four universities will enable them to conduct unclassified research for one year, FCW said, adding the government then has the right to exercise two one-year option periods to continue research. Each university will receive $1 million to $2.5 million for the first year, for a total of about $8.2 million, said FCW, and results from each lablet will be published by the Science of Security Virtual Organization.

Basic research by these lablets, or small labs, will focus on five problem areas including scalability and composability, policy-governed secure collaboration, security metrics, resilient architectures, and understanding and accounting for human behavior.

The NSA, the private sector and other organizations have been pushing to develop a science of security, which is essentially a rigorous scientific foundation to help advance cybersecurity. In other words, scientific research is conducted on how security systems are designed, built, used and maintained so that security challenges can be better understood and addressed, versus an ad hoc or patchwork approach to identify and remove specific threats with limited scope.

Over the last three years, the NSA said it has funded almost 300 departments at universities to develop lablets and create a research community into the science of security.

For more:
– go to the NSA announcement