IUCRC Phase II Colorado State University: Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation CCAA

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

Failure to protect systems from cyberattacks in an increasingly interconnected world has severe consequences. The Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA) with its universities, government and commercial partners will embark on the development of science and technology to protect, defend, and survive such attacks that are launched by advanced, persistent, and evolving adversaries. The multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach will provide research and technological solutions that will improve sense-making, decision making, and resiliency to sustain cyber missions in the event of cyber warfare and sophisticated cyberattacks. CCAA with its experts in cybersecurity, formal modeling, and data-driven analytics will advance cybersecurity in multiple ways including (a) robust and scalable sense-making for dynamic and predictive cyber risk analytics using large-scale heterogeneous cyber artifacts, (b) adaptive and autonomic decision-making for creating defense strategies and courses of action that are provably correct and operationally safe using mission requirements, security policies and guidelines, and system configurations, (c) making resilience and agility inherent properties of cyber and cyber physical systems to enable real-time deterrence, deception, and mitigation. The Colorado State University (CSU) site will contribute in formal methods, cyber physical systems, machine learning, and networking. The Center's research will advance the field of cyber security through its research in preventing, detecting, recovering, and surviving cyberattacks in a connected world and make systems safe, secure, and resilient. Technology transfer will occur through start-ups, student and faculty internships at the member organizations. Students at all levels, high-school, undergraduates, and graduates will be involved in the projects. Minority students, especially first generation, will be actively recruited. Efforts will be made to have students do internships at the industrial organizations and the partner universities. The Center will make all the artifacts developed in this project in a central repository that will be accessible to all its members. The repository will be accessible through the Center's website (http://www.ccaa-nsf.org/). The artifacts include manuscripts, code, datasets, and experimental results. Some of these materials will also be disseminated to the public, selected external organizations conforming to the bylaws of the Center, the NSF policies, and the individual universities requirements. The repository will be available for the duration of the Phase II project, and an earnest attempt will be made to maintain the repository after the project ends. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.