SAC-PA: Towards Security Assured Cyberinfrastructure in Pennsylvania

Cybersecurity is a growing concern at individual, social/community, national and global levels. Several recent high profile cyber attacks indicate that cybersecurity has already become one of the most critical national security concerns. While the rapid progress in IT sectors provides tremendous opportunities to accelerate data-driven scientific research, the increasing cybersecurity problems can adversely impact the scientific research and its economic and social benefits if the cyberinfrastructure that facilitates scientific innovations is not well protected. Besides innovative cybersecurity solutions, it is also critical to establish more structured and effective set of security practices and better collaboration among various stakeholders towards sharing of cybersecurity resources, expertise and information. To address this growing national challenge to secure cyberinfrastructure that, in particular, is in place to foster the scientific research and education community, it is critical that regional collaborations be formed.

Towards this, we propose to develop a regional collaboration and partnership framework called SAC-PA. The key goals of the SAC-PA framework project is thus to establish and foster regional collaboration for sharing resources, and increasing and streamlining regional capabilities in the practice of cybersecurity for cyberinfrastructure area. We propose to carry out the following tasks:

1. develop and deliver three regional workshops focused on security assured cyberinfrastructure;
2. collaboratively develop training/awareness materials;
3. establish regional partnerships and a shared repository of cybersecurity resources/capabilities.