Azer Bestavros Confers with Federal Officials on Cybersecurity

On July 8, Azer Bestavros met with staffers from the Department of Defense (DOD) and Homeland Security (DHS) to discuss several cybersecurity initiatives, including the Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS), a $10 million, five-year, National Science Foundation–funded project to help develop information systems with several layers of security measures.

Bestavros also briefed officials on the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a computing cloud Hariri is developing that he says will be more secure than other clouds. (In cloud computing, users have on-demand access to shared, massive, off-site computer resources.) The information on BU’s projects was “very well received” by the officials, he says.

Bestavros stated: “At the DOD, the discussions focused on how our MACS project and the Massachusetts Open Cloud might provide operational cybersecurity capabilities for [supporting] the IT infrastructure for the DOD, and also on opportunities to better engage with the Army, Air Force, and Navy basic research offices. At the DHS, the discussion focused on the challenges associated with applications that require sharing of big data assets across agencies and corporations, including support for data security and privacy.”