The Institute is actively engaged with both the private and public sectors in a variety of basic research and problem-driven research activities in the program areas listed below. The goal of basic research is to achieve fundamental breakthroughs in the science of cybersecurity. The Institute takes a longer-term view with the objective of making key advances in the creation of a national-scale hacker-resistant information infrastructure whereas problem-driven research projects seek solutions to hard problems of a near-term nature.
The Institute is engaged with many corporations seeking research solutions to exceedingly difficult and complex cybersecurity problems. This class of research represents a win-win, such that the corporations receive solutions to problems that make a difference to their operations, while Institute researchers (faculty, post-doctoral and student) receive satisfaction that their solutions are making a difference in today's information-centric environment.
This program focuses on hardware and networking security research projects. Both conventional and emerging technology research endeavors fall within the mission of this program. With respect to hardware security research, there are two principal categories of security threats; intentional and non-intentional. Intentional threats occur due to purposely introduced circuit functionality, or hardware malware, that allow exploitation to occur. Non-intentional threats exploit design flaws or unspecified behavior.
Network security engineering largely overlaps hardware security engineering at the lower physical and data link layers and both hardware and networking systems heavily leverage similar operational models. Network security projects at the higher layers are also within the domain of this program. Finally, this program also engages in research involving emerging technologies that have direct impact with respect to cybersecurity such as quantum information processing and reversible computing.