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Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

Expanding cybersecurity and privacy research

August 12th, 2014 / in NSF, Research News / by Helen Wright

The National Science Foundation (NSF)‘s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program has announced two Frontier-scale projects, part of a $74.5 million investment to support foundational cybersecurity research and education and address grand challenges in cybersecurity science and engineering.

SaTC’s Frontier awards are part a diverse $74.5 million portfolio of more than 225 new projects in 39 states. These projects have the potential for broad economic and scientific impact. They are aimed at minimizing the misuses of cyber-technology, bolstering education and training in cybersecurity, establishing the science of security, and transitioning promising cybersecurity research into practice.

The first of the Frontier awards helps establish the Center for Encrypted Functionalities (CEF). CEF’s goal is to use new encryption methods to make a computer program invisible to an outside observer, while still preserving its functionality. This is known as program obfuscation, creating software that can hide vulnerabilities from potential adversaries and therefore strengthen encryption and information transfer. The project has educational components as well. It plans to introduce K-12 students from under-represented minorities to cybersecurity and computer science . In addition, CEF is developing free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to teach large numbers of learners the fundamental principles of encryption.

The second Frontier grant was awarded to the Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project, which aims to build information systems for the cloud with meaningful multi-layered security. The project will build the cybersecurity system from separate functional components to make a whole system derived from the security of its components. A key component of the project is the Massachusetts Open Cloud, which provides the research team with a test-bed for deploying and testing the developed mechanisms in a production cloud.

For more information about these awards and the SaTC program please see the NSF press release 14-089.