Trusted CI collaboration receives $12.5 million renewal grant from NSF

URBANA, IL – The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE), a $12.5 million renewal grant to extend the CCoE through 2024.

Over the past seven years, Trusted CI pioneered and set the standard for an NSF CCoE through continuous innovation in cybersecurity and cultivating the NSF community’s trust in Trusted CI as a partner and a leader. Trusted CI has thus far helped over 250 projects improve their cybersecurity posture.

The NSF CCoE is a collaboration between the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Internet2, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“The dynamic, open, and distributed nature of scientific collaboration introduces unique cybersecurity challenges for scientific cyberinfrastructure,” said NCSA’s Jim Basney, who serves as deputy director of Trusted CI. “With our focus on cybersecurity for NSF science, Trusted CI provides leadership and guidance that addresses these unique challenges.”

Recognizing the importance of scientific data integrity, in 2020 Trusted CI will form a working group with the four NSF Big Data Innovation Hubs, including the NCSA-led Midwest Big Data Hub, to address the challenges related to the intersection of cybersecurity and big data. The group will publish a survey of data integrity needs across NSF research projects and provide guidance on addressing those needs.

In its work with Trusted CI, NCSA contributes operational security expertise gained from over 30 years of designing and deploying systems that meet stringent cybersecurity requirements to serve a diverse, national scientific community. NCSA also adopts Trusted CI recommendations across its projects.

“The Trusted CI Guide to Developing Cybersecurity Programs was very helpful for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project,” said Alex Withers, chief information security officer for NCSA and security working group co-chair for XSEDE. “Continued leadership from Trusted CI will help us address emerging threats as cyberinfrastructure continues to evolve in support of the scientific mission.”

Manish Parashar, director of NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, said, “Trustworthiness is at the heart of scientific discovery and reproducibility. As a result, cyberinfrastructure enabling scientific research and discovery must be trustworthy. The Trusted CI project is a key investment by NSF towards realizing a more trustworthy scientific cyberinfrastructure and research landscape.”

Trusted CI works with the open science community through direct engagements to tackle individual projects’ cybersecurity-related challenges, the sharing of effective practices through monthly webinars and publications, and the annual NSF Cybersecurity Summit, bringing together over one hundred members of the community to share experiences and form key relationships.

Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant ACI-1920430. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or any other organization.

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