Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Oct. 23, 2014.
With cyber attacks being volleyed at U.S. infrastructure daily, the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has awarded the first federally-funded research and development center (FFRDC) contract designed specifically to enhance the nation’s cybersecurity.
The new FFRDC — part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s NCCoE — will be managed by non-profit MITRE Corp. with assistance from the University System of Maryland, which includes campuses in College Park and Baltimore County.
“This really is demonstrative of a new day,” UMCP Assistant Vice-President for Research and Development Eric Chapman said. “Cybersecurity as an industry is still relatively youthful and nascent — there aren’t any common practices. Without neutral third party leadership we couldn’t set up those best practices.”
The group will be pulling together best practices and security strategies intended to work across platforms.
“We’re going to favor the standards and technologies that are low-cost and scalable,” Chapman said.
“The hope is, as a neutral party, we can help design security solutions across industry verticals that don’t have any bias” toward specific companies or software types, said Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC Center for Cybersecurity and professor of computer science and electrical engineering.
The group plans to work with commercial stakeholders, government and academia to set their ever-changing agenda.
“The idea that the user community helps identify the key verticals,” Joshi explained. “Then, the academic leadership and research staff and user community as a whole starts to identify the verticals, off-the-shelf options and the gaps, as well as the gaps where more research has to be done.”
“The main goal is really to bring stakeholders in the tech sectors and academia together,” according to Dr. Joseph JaJa, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). “Cybersecurity is a very fast moving target. We’re going to try to bring to bear some of these new technologies as needed.”
MITRE’s team of 40 scientists and researchers will be bringing that information together to propagate real-world solutions.
