NSF announces two Frontier-scale projects
Today, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program announced two new center-scale “Frontier” awards to support large, multi-institution projects that address grand challenges in cybersecurity science and engineering with the potential for broad economic and scientific impact.
One Frontier grant was awarded to the Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project, which aims to build information systems for the cloud with meaningful multi-layered security. In the project, researchers will design and test a modular approach to cybersecurity. The project will build the cybersecurity system from smaller, separate functional components, each asserting its own security individually. As a result, the security of the system as a whole will be derived from the security of its components.
“Our goal is to build a cloud with clear and transparent security properties,” said Ran Canetti, a professor of computer science at Boston University and lead researcher on the project. “Furthermore, we intend to make it modular, thus enabling the construction of cloud services from basic components in a security-preserving way. If successful, this project will transform the way we currently build and argue about secure systems.”
The team–made up of researchers from Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Connecticut and Northeastern University–comprises experts in different aspects of information security and cryptography.
A key component of the MACS project is its integration into the Massachusetts Open Cloud, which provides the research team with a testbed for deploying and testing the mechanisms they develop at reasonable scale. The project continues NSF’s commitment to support the transition of great ideas from research to practice. Read More…