Breaking News - Security:
NCASSR Receives $7M For Second Year Of Cybersecurity Research
The Office of Naval Research has announced second-year funding of more than $7
million for a national cybersecurity research center led by the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (NCASSR) was launched
in 2003 with an initial grant of $5.7 million; its mission is to conduct
research leading to the development of next-generation information security
technologies.
"The nation's security and economy are dependent on information and
communications," said NCSA interim director Rob Pennington, the NCASSR project
director. "Our research will contribute substantially to secure, reliable
communications and intelligence-gathering tools, tools that are also sure to
have applications in business, scientific exploration and education."
"Developing a secure cyberinfrastructure is vital to our nation's military
forces and crisis response teams," said U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
R-IL. "Through its efforts and innovation, NCASSR will help ensure that
America has the secure technological tools needed for intelligence gathering
and crisis communication."
"I believe America's investment in fundamental cybersecurity research will be
rewarded as NCSA brings its significant expertise in networking, security and
data mining to bear on this important effort," said U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson,
(IL-15).
NCASSR is led by NCSA, with collaborating partners at the University of
Illinois, Battelle Pacific Northwest Division, InfoAssure Inc, the University
of Tennessee and the Naval Postgraduate School. In its second year, NCASSR
will focus on five interrelated themes:
- Cyberinformatics: NCASSR researchers will explore methods for the discovery
of suspicious patterns and events from a wide variety of sensors and data
sources. The goal is to develop a cybersecurity framework based on data mining
and visualization approaches, with an emphasis on linkage analysis, outlier
detection, multiple metaphor representations, and predictive modeling and for
the system to be able to work with streaming, relational, text and
spatiotemporal data.
- Security tools: Building on successes in this area from its first year,
NCASSR will continue to develop software to provide security across many
layers of a computer network—including validating hardware integrity, secure
operating systems, secure group communication key management, and secure
multicast and wireless networks—to provide end-to-end system security.
- Sensors and software-defined radio (SDR): With substantial work already
completed in year one, NCASSR will continue to explore issues related to the
combination of sensors with software-defined radio, including efficient
antenna designs for mobile sensors, organizing and authenticating groups of
mobile sensors, and high-level application deployment. The focus will be on
designing a low-cost SDR platform in which signal processing is handled by
flexible software rather than rigid hardware.
- SCADA protocol authentication program: SCADA refers to the Supervisory
Control And Data Acquisition systems that are used in key energy
infrastructures, such as electric power grids and water pipelines. Research in
this area will focus on developing secure mechanisms for authenticating valid
control signals and data acquisition and for blocking unauthorized intrusions.
- Secure Grid laboratory: This research will include projects centered on
testbed development activities, including Simulated Anomalous Behavior and
Recognition (SABRE), Programming and Testing Applications on Wireless Network
of Sensors (PAWNS), MLS (Heterogeneous MultiLevel Secure) Network Testbed,
Central Testbed (Network, Host, Grid Equipment) and the CyberCIEGE Extended
Scenarios training activity.
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