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CHAMPAIGN, IL— A new national cybersecurity research center, funded by the Office of Naval Research, will be led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (NCASSR) will be launched with an initial $5.7 million to address the nation’s critical need for a dynamic, adaptive cybersecurity infrastructure. The center will enhance and safeguard the computing and networking tools available to the nation’s military forces through a variety of projects. These will include the development of better ways of monitoring network security to prevent hostile cyberattacks, such as computer worms and viruses, and the creation of adaptable radios that will allow emergency personnel from crisis response agencies to communicate more effectively. “NCSA’s experience with cutting-edge computing systems and their application to a broad set of science, engineering and policy domains, combined with the wealth of knowledge and expertise at the University of Illinois, makes us the natural choice to lead this effort to create innovative cybersecurity solutions,“ said NCSA director Dan Reed, the NCASSR project director. “By combining the strengths of NCSA with those of University and national collaborators, we will be able to develop more resilient and flexible software, networks and tools—ones suitable for use in an increasingly dangerous world.” "In the past two years, we have all come to understand how vitally important it is for our nation to have a secure cyberinfrastructure," said U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL. "NCSA and the University of Illinois have the experts in networking, security, and data mining to lead this important effort and to put Illinois at the forefront in addressing our country's need for cybersecurity." "This initiative will ensure that our military forces and crisis response teams have the technological tools they need to safeguard our country," said U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson, (IL-15). "NCSA, with its years of experience in developing network infrastructure, is ideally suited to lead this crucial research." The bulk of the NCASSR research will occur at NCSA, with collaborating partners at Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research (CISR) at the Naval Postgraduate School, and InfoAssure, Inc. NCSA-led cybersecurity projects include: Analyzing the scalability, strengths and weaknesses of authentication and authorization methods to determine the best way to ensure the privacy of real-time collaboration and information sharing. This joint project with InfoAssure is designed to help U.S. military forces share critical information without fear of interception. Ensuring the integrity of hundreds of thousands of mobile sensors deployed for battlefield sensing, so military forces can rely on their data without concerns about misleading information planted by opposing forces. Prototyping a portable software-defined radio (SDR) in which radio signals are programmed by software, rather than determined by hardware. With SDRs, emergency personnel from various agencies wouldn’t be hampered by devices that operate on incompatible frequencies and could more easily communicate during a crisis. Sustaining open lines of communication in command and control situations by developing multicasting systems that are able to recover from attacks and withstand low-level failures. Making networks safer by developing an integrated framework that will help monitors quickly determine when a network is under attack, what is being attacked, and what form the attack is taking. Quicker, more accurate threat detection could dramatically decrease the havoc created by computer viruses, worms, and other malevolent programs. Detecting trends, failures, and unauthorized intrusions in multidimensional streaming data, such as data on electrical power loads, network traffic, mobile sensors, and environment monitoring. Enhancing intelligence gathering by developing tools to assist information analysts, including automated analysis and synthesis of streaming data and automated discovery and integration of new data sources. Projects at NCASSR partner sites include improving techniques for the detection of and protection against malicious code and constructive security to address the risk of system subversion in the commercial software and hardware components our military forces—and businesses—rely on.