Enhancing Cybersecurity Research and Experimentation Infrastructure
Abstract
The main objective of the proposal is to acquire the essential equipment for significantly expanding the existing cybersecurity research and experimentation infrastructure at the Department of Defense (DoD) sponsored Center of Excellence (COE) in Cyber Security at Norfolk State University (NSU) with a primary mission to support the cybersecurity research, education, outreach and workforce development programs at the COE and NSU. As a secondary mission, the expanded infrastructure will also be used to selectively support other STEM research and research-related programs that can be significantly enhanced by utilizing the advanced capabilities of this infrastructure, in fields such as data sciences, computational sciences, bioinformatics, health informatics, and materials engineering. The COE in Cyber Security was launched in April 2015 for a five-year period of performance until April 2020. The proposed expansion in infrastructural capabilities and capacities is critically needed to support three new or rapidly growing major research initiatives established for the COE: 1) Research collaboration with the other two DoD-sponsored COEÕs in Autonomy and Research Data Analysis, respectively, especially in machine learning, collaborative decision making, intelligent/cognitive systems, and large-scale real-time data analytics for cybersecurity; 2) Research collaboration with the DoD community including the Air Force Research Lab, Army Research Office, Test Resource Management Center/National Cyber Range, and Naval Network Warfare Command; and 3) Research collaboration and support for interoperability and portability with other established large-scale cybersecurity research and experimentation testbeds such as DeterLab (supported by NSF, DHS and DARPA), and Emulytics (supported by Sandia National Labs). The proposed major equipment to be acquired includes enterprise-grade servers, workstations, storage, and networking devices. These systems will be installed, configured and managed alongside the existing equipment to provide an expanded secure, robust, flexible, and feature-rich infrastructure at the COE and NSU that will allow a much larger number and wider variety of research and experimentation efforts to take place concurrently than what is possible today. Opensource and free software and resources will continue to be the primary source for operating systems, middleware, applications software and tools for these systems. The requested equipment will be used collaboratively with another major cybersecurity initiative sponsored by the Department of Energy for a Consortium for K-20 Cybersecurity Workforce Pipeline. The NSU-led Consortium project began in October 2014 for a five-year period of performance until September 2019. In addition to research, the expanded infrastructure will be used to provide a more versatile and user-friendly learning environment for undergraduate and graduate students to gain hands-on, in-depth knowledge and skills in cybersecurity, cloud computing and big data analytics, through research courses, projects, and educational programs, including the two new courses to be developed by the COE. It will be used to support a growing number and variety of outreach and workforce development initiatives at the COE and NSU, including the cybersecurity related summer internship programs and summer camps for undergraduate students, high school students and teachers. The enhanced infrastructure will bring significant benefits to the COE in Cyber Security, NSU, the HBCU/MI community and the nation through the synergistic and extensive cybersecurity research, education, outreach and workforce development efforts at the COE and NSU.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 20, 2018
- Source ID
- W911NF1610479
Entities
People
- Chung-chu Hsieh
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Norfolk State University
- Office of the Secretary of Defense