Premier institutes MIT, Carnegie and Purdue joins cybersecurity research consortium

Northrop Grumman has invited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and Purdue University to join a newly formed Cybersecurity Research Consortium to develop solutions to counter the complex cyber threats facing the world economy, freedom of information, and national security.

The Northrop Grumman Cybersecurity Research Consortium (NGCRC) members maintain laboratories and centers, they include MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Carnegie Mellon's CyLab, and Purdue's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).

Northrop Grumman says, the consortium will take on some of the cyber problems including attribution in cyberspace, supply chain risk, and securing critical infrastructure networks. The NGCRC will initially sponsor ten projects and provide graduate student fellowships while continuing to expand the portfolio of research to cover the many different aspects of cybersecurity.

"The MIT CSAIL team approaches the cyber security problem from multiple perspectives -- how to design software systems from the ground up to be secure and dependable, how to provide a security audit trail that captures every system event that is related to information security, and how to design new hardware architecture so that it can protect software," said Victor Zue, director of MIT CSAIL.

"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, Northrop Grumman 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 US organizations to help increase our nation's security in cyberspace."