Two George Mason University professors recently received a $268,000 grant for a new cybersecurity consulting project.
The Korea Agency for Defense Development awarded the grant toAngelos Stavrou, director of George Mason's Center for Assurance Research and Engineering in the Volgenau School of Engineering, and J.P. Auffret, director of the MS in Management of Secure Information Systems at the School of Business.
The professors have partnered with Brent Kang, a professor in the Cyber Security Systems Research Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. They will provide technical consulting on test and evaluation methodologies for cybersecurity technologies that the Korea Agency for Defense Development is creating.
The project for the South Korean defense agency takes on heightened significance in the wake of the alleged North Korean cyberattacks on Sony last year. Cybersecurity test and evaluation methodology is a much-needed, yet still relatively unexplored area, which has made it difficult for organizations to determine the efficacy and value of technologies.
"Despite the growing demand and rapid development of cybersecurity technologies, evaluating these technologies and being able to ascertain how effective they are, or comparing the effectiveness of two cybersecurity technologies, is a major challenge," explained Auffret. "Companies and organizations are investing in cybersecurity, but with the field still developing, have difficulty in assessing how secure these technologies are and the benefit of investing in different technologies."
Stavrou, Auffret and the team are conducting comprehensive research using critical qualitative and quantitative metrics to develop such evaluation methodologies and frameworks. Their current work includes survey and analysis on methodologies for cyberattack-resilient and tolerant systems, test scenarios to apply to methodologies and creation of evaluation criteria specifically for the intrusion-tolerant systems under study at the Korea Agency for Defense Development.
The partnership is promising and timely, as it comes on the heels of the opening of Mason's new campus in Songdo, Korea. Mason Korea welcomed its first students in fall 2014 and currently offers undergraduate programs in economics, management and global affairs.
A version of this story by Nicole Hitpas originally appeared in Mason News on May 21, 2015.