The Northrop Grumman Cybersecurity Research Consortium, involving Purdue, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., was announced Tuesday (Dec. 1) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The group will work to accelerate the transfer of technology from ideas to real-life application.

“The Cybersecurity Research Consortium is a wonderful new initiative for CERIAS,” said Gene Spafford, the Purdue center’s executive director. “For more than 15 years, Purdue has been the leading academic group in research and education in information security. Our mission has been to build collaborative relationships with industry, government and other academic entities to advance the state of cybersecurity through basic and applied research while serving as a resource to the global community. We welcome this opportunity for new collaborations and inspirations and look forward to continuing to innovate at the forefront of information protection and privacy.”

Robert Brammer, chief technology officer for Northrop Grumman Information Systems, said Purdue was among the first institutions the corporation thought of when putting the consortium together.

“Purdue’s CERIAS is the largest academic security center in the United States and has won many awards for research and educational excellence in cybersecurity,” Brammer said. “Purdue has produced about 25 percent of the Ph.D.’s in cybersecurity in the past several years and has developed many successful security inventions.”

A motivating factor in starting the consortium was to address some of the issues in President Obama’s report last May of the threats and the need to be in front of cybersecurity issues, Spafford said. CERIAS research was referenced four times in the president’s report.

“CERIAS has long held the belief that too much of today’s information security research focuses on patching near-term problems at the expense of fixing long-term issues,” Spafford said. “The consortium enables four leading research institutions to focus on addressing the fundamental issues of information security, assurance and privacy.”

The consortium will take on some of our world’s leading cyber problems, initially sponsoring 10 projects and providing graduate student fellowships while continuing to expand the portfolio of research to cover the many different aspects of cybersecurity. Members will coordinate research projects, share information and best practices, develop curricula, author joint case studies and other publications, and provide a greater number of learning opportunities and applications for students and the defense community.

For its part, CERIAS will conduct research in four areas:

• Elisa Bertino, a computer science professor and director of research for CERIAS, will examine embedding information into a digitial signal and origins of data streams for information attribution.
• Bharat Bhargava, a computer science professor and CERIAS fellow, will lead research into the detection and defense against attacks in cloudlike distributed systems.
• Sonia Fahmy, associate professor in computer science, will lead research into decomposing Internet-scale models to accurately perform constrained experiments.
• Rick Mislan, assistant professor in computer and information technology, will lead research into fast forensics, improving the speed and fidelity of forensics in the field on cell phones, PDAs and similar devices.

CERIAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary academic center addressing the issues of information security, assurance, privacy and cybercrime. The center involves more than 80 faculty and 100 graduate students from 18 academic departments across eight of Purdue’s colleges.

The center was spawned from the Computer Operations, Audit and Security Technology (COAST) lab that was started in 1991 within Purdue’s computer sciences department from research by professors Spafford and Samuel Wagstaff Jr. In 1998 CERIAS began with state funding to look at information security from a multidisciplinary perspective. Since then, the center has taken part in more than 200 projects with private business, agency or government funding, including a recent study for antivirus software giant McAfee Inc. that found companies lost an estimated $4.6 billion in intellectual property in 2008 as a result of cybercrime.

Spafford has worked with government, law enforcement, corporate and academic officials, including two U.S. presidents, the FBI, departments of Justice and Energy, the U.S. Air Force, Microsoft, Intel, Unisys, and the National Science Foundation. He is the 2009 recipient of the Computing Research Association’s Distinguished Service Award and has testified before Congress many times on cybersecurity.

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Professor Eugene H. Spafford, executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), says the coordinator will probably have no authority over budget and policy, and thus will have difficulty getting the attention of cabinet secretaries, agency heads and CEOs.

President Obama's White House announcement falls short of candidate Obama's campaign promises first made at a town hall meeting at Purdue last year.

President Obama announced the creation of the position last Friday when releasing an administration report on national infrastructure and cybersecurity. Spafford says the president did well to highlight some of the major problems involved. However, Spafford said, President Obama’s White House announcement falls short of candidate Obama’s campaign promises first made at a town hall meeting at Purdue last year.

“The president said that the appointee will have ‘regular access’ to him. That is not the same as an adviser. And this is a difference that can mean a lot in Washington circles,” Spafford said.

Spafford compared the position to a largely ineffectual position in the Bush administration in 2001. He fears the failure to announce an appointment indicates the White House may be having a difficult time filling the new position appropriately. He also has expressed concern that economic advisers will have veto authority over the new position.

“The risk to our nation’s cybersecurity is not going to go away with a continuation of minimal investment and wishful thinking,” Spafford said. “Given the current stress in the economy, I don’t expect any meaningful actions to be approved that cost anything; we will still have the mindset that ‘cheapest must be best’ or ‘it can wait a little longer.’ That will simply make the problems more expensive and difficult to fix in later years.”

Spafford has worked with government, law enforcement, corporate, and academic officials including two U.S. presidents, the FBI, departments of Justice and Energy, the U.S. Air Force, Microsoft, Intel, Unisys, and the National Science Foundation. He is the 2009 recipient of the Computing Research Association’s Distinguished Service Award “for his long and effective leadership on issues of computer security and policy, professional responsibility, and the Internet.” He has testified before Congress many times on cybersecurity and has been a source for the major U.S. television networks and media outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post.

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