The Office of Naval Research has announced fourth-year funding of nearly $2.7 million for a national cybersecurity research center led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with collaborating partners at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Since its launch in 2003, the National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (NCASSR) has focused on basic and applied research leading to the development of next-generation information security technologies such as data mining, intrusion detection and analysis, secure communications, and secure grids, sensor networks, and infrastructure.

A major emphasis for the center's fourth year will be integrating many previously-developed, NCASSR-supported technologies into a cyberenvironment framework designed to help system administrators and law enforcement professionals collaboratively investigate attacks on multiple large distributed systems, according to Randy Butler, principal investigator for NCASSR.

"The kinds of innovative technologies developed and supported by NCASSR are critical for protecting the nation's economy, defense systems, and infrastructure against cyberattacks," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "NCASSR's goal of enabling IT and law enforcement professionals to use those technologies collaboratively and in an integrated way reflects NCSA's larger vision for enabling science and engineering communities to undertake large, complex projects that are crucial to the national interest."

NCASSR will support several other critical security projects this year as well, such as development of a secure infrastructure for emergency communications, lightweight formal methods for software security testing automation, and development of an innovative, effective method for detecting rare events in data streams that could identify system intrusions in progress. This year NCASSR will also continue its support of systems for performance testing and evaluation of cybersecurity tools, in addition to development of added features for a training simulator designed to provide system administrators at Department of Defense organizations with hands-on experience in combating attacks on sensitive systems. For more information about NCASSR and its current and past research efforts, see http://www.ncassr.org/.