News

Purdue, MIT, Carnegie Mellon Partner with Northrop Grumman on Cyber Security Research

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 12/11/09

Three universities have joined up with a major defense contractor to research cyber threats. Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have joined with Northrop Grumman to take on some of the most complex cyber problems.

Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Carnegie Mellon's Cybersecurity Education and Research Center (CyLab) will sponsor 10 projects as part of the Northrop Grumman Cybersecurity Research Consortium. These will include attribution in cyberspace, supply chain risk, and securing critical infrastructure networks.

According to CERIAS Executive Director Gene Spafford, inspiration for starting the consortium was to research long-term issues. "The consortium enables four leading research institutions to focus on addressing the fundamental issues of information security, assurance and privacy."

Members will coordinate research projects, share information and best practices, develop curricula, author joint case studies and other publications, and increase the number of learning opportunities and applications for students and the defense community.

"We have been working in the cybersecurity domain for more than 20 years, and I have never seen the threats so intense," said Robert Brammer, chief technology officer at Northrop Grumman for Information Systems. "To help mitigate these threats, we must bring together industry and our academic institutions. By combining the creative intellectual freedoms of academia with the full spectrum capabilities within Northrop Grumman, we can accelerate the pace of taking novel ideas to significant application. We have an obligation to our clients and our nation to invest in new technologies to get ahead of the cybersecurity threat. This consortium will serve to organize some important [United States] organizations to help increase our nation's security in cyberspace."