Multiple
awards include two large "Frontier" collaborative projects totaling
$15 million
The National Science Foundation (NSF)
today awarded $50 million for research projects to build a cybersecure society
and protect the United States' vast information infrastructure.
The investments were made through the
NSF's Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, which builds on the
agency's long-term support for a wide range of cutting edge interdisciplinary
research and education activities to secure critical infrastructure that is
vulnerable to a wide range of threats that challenge its security.
"Securing cyberspace is key to
America's global economic competitiveness and prosperity," said NSF
Director Subra Suresh. "NSF's investment in the fundamental research of
cybersecurity is core to national security and economic vitality that embraces
efficiency while also maintaining privacy."
In response to the SaTC call for
proposals, more than 70 new research projects were funded, with award amounts
ranging from about $100,000 to $10 million. This SaTC funding portfolio invests
in state-of-the-art research in incentives that reduce the likelihood of cyber
attacks and mitigate the negative effects arising from them. Together, these
SaTC awards aim to improve the resilience of operating systems, software,
hardware and critical infrastructure while preserving privacy, promoting
usability and ensuring trustworthiness through foundational research and
prototype deployments.
Two of the SaTC funded projects are
Frontier awards, which are large, multi-institution projects that aim to
provide high-level visibility to grand challenge research areas.
The SaTC program supports research from
a number of disciplinary perspectives with investments from NSF's Directorates
for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE); Mathematical and
Physical Sciences; and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, as well as the
Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
"We are excited that the SaTC award
portfolio contains many interdisciplinary projects, including these two
Frontier projects at the scale and complexity of research centers," said
Farnam Jahanian, assistant director of NSF's CISE directorate. "The challenges
they address--the technical and economic elements of Internet security and the
issues associated with sharing of data in cyberspace while protecting
individual privacy--are fundamental; addressing them will help establish a
scientific basis for developing and operating computing and communications
infrastructure that can resist attacks and be tailored to meet a wide range of
technical and policy requirements."
What follows are descriptions of the two
Frontier awards.
Beyond
Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic
Perspectives
University of California-San Diego -
Stefan Savage
International Computer Science Institute
- Vern Paxson
George Mason University - Damon McCoy
This project will receive a five-year
grant totaling $10 million to tackle the technical and economic elements of
Internet security: how the motivations and interactions of attackers, defenders
and users shape the threats we face, how they evolve over time and how they can
best be addressed.
While security is mediated by the
technical workings of computers and networks, a commensurate level of scrutiny
is driven by conflict between economic and social issues. Today's online
attackers are commonly profit-seeking, and the implicit social networks that
link them together play a critical role in fostering underlying cybercrime
markets. By using a socio-economic lens, this project seeks to gain insights
for understanding attackers, as well as victims, in order to help consumers,
corporations and governments make large investments in security technology with
greater understanding of their ultimate return-on-investment.
Security research has tended to focus
only on the technologies that enable and defend against attacks. This project
also emphasizes the economic incentives that motivate the majority of Internet
attacks, the elaborate marketplaces that support them, and the relationships
among cyber criminals who rely upon each other for services and expertise.
Grappling with both the economic and
technical dimensions of cybersecurity is of fundamental importance for
achieving a secure future information infrastructure, and developing a sound
understanding requires research grounded in observation and experiment.
Accordingly, the research will focus on four key components to:
1.Pursue in-depth empirical analyses of
a range of online criminal activities.
2.Map out the evolving attacker
ecosystem that preys on online social networks, and the extent to which unsafe
online behavior is itself adopted and transmitted.
3.Study how relationships among these
criminals are established, maintained and evolve over time.
4.Measure the efficacy of today's
security interventions, both at large and at the level of individual users.
Consequently, this research has the potential
to dramatically benefit society by undermining entire cybercrime ecosystems by,
for example, disrupting underground activities, infrastructure and social
networks.
Privacy
Tools for Sharing Research Data
Harvard University - Salil Vadhan
A multi-disciplinary team of researchers
at Harvard University will receive a four-year grant totaling nearly $5 million
to develop tools and policies to aid the collection, analysis and sharing of
data in cyberspace, while protecting individual privacy.
Today, information technology, advances
in statistical computing and the deluge of data available through the Internet
are transforming all areas of science and engineering. However, maintaining the
privacy of human subjects is a major challenge. Given the complexities involved
in ensuring privacy for shared research data, Vadhan will be joined by a team
of professors with expertise in areas such as mathematics and statistics,
government, technology and law. Together they will engage in a
multi-disciplinary approach to refine and develop definitions and measures for
privacy and data utility. They will also design an array of technological,
legal and policy tools that can be used when dealing with sensitive data.
These tools will be tested and deployed
at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science's Dataverse Network,
an open-source digital repository that offers the largest catalogue of science
datasets in the world. The ideas and tools developed in this project will have
a significant broad impact on society since the issues addressed in the work
arise in many other important domains, including public health and electronic
commerce.
-NSF-
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