CHAMPAIGN — High-profile hacks of big retailers, banks, movie studios and airlines have propelled cybersecurity challenges into the headlines.
The University of Illinois will lead a new multidisciplinary center designed to help government and industry beef up the resilience of the nation’s cyber infrastructure, including the power grid, telecommunications networks and transportation systems.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has awarded $3.4 million for the first year of the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Center of Excellence, which is slated to get $20 million over five years.
The center will focus on improving resilience — a system’s ability to both detect a potential threat and recover from an attack or natural disaster as quickly as possible — as well as making a business case for investing in protections for their cyber assets, said Professor Jeffrey Binder, director of the Illinois Applied Research Institute.
“Lots of folks have worked on ideas and technologies” to improve resilience, he said. “What this project is really about is how do you get these technologies out into the business community so they can implement it?”
Doing that requires balancing the potential cost vs. the potential risk of an attack, he said.
At Illinois, the effort will be led by the Information Trust Institute, which has expertise in the science of security, and the Applied Research Institute, which specializes in translating research into real-world applications. The UI’s Coordinated Science Lab and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications will likely also be involved, Binder said.
“Critical infrastructure systems are susceptible to catastrophic interruptions, whether it’s from natural or malicious causes,” said David Nicol, principal investigator for the project and director of the Information Trust Institute. “Our goal is to address the systematic challenges we face in making sure that infrastructures that modern life depends on continue to work, even in the face of disruptions.”
Nicol said the center has the potential to transform the design and operation of critical infrastructure.
“We have an interdisciplinary group of engineers, lawyers, business experts and others who are all committed to quickly delivering solutions to the field,” he said in a release.
The UI will have partners in both academic and industry for the center, including Cornell University, Northeastern University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, USC and the University of Washington.
Research projects will explore the resilience of the manufacturing sector and supply chains, for example, and the impact of security improvements on cyber insurance costs, Binder said.
“This is like putting an airbag on your cybersystem. What does that mean for an insurance premium?” he asked.
Another area: the security of drones and other technology used by police and other first responders.
“When there’s a thread of information that goes to the fire chief who’s directing his firemen in a certain way, how do we trust that system is the right information so he’s making the right decisions?” Binder said.
The project will also bring in workers or business leaders to train them on new technologies and may also include demonstration projects at power plants or water systems, he said.
The world is growing increasingly cyber-dependent, with the advent of autonomous vehicles, “fit bits” and an “Internet of things” that raise new kinds of security risks, Binder said.
“I think there’s an increasing need for the country to get really bright minds to work on these problems, and to get them engaged early,” he said.
The UI’s reputation for leadership in technology research, particularly in cybersecurity, was a key factor in winning the grant, Binder said. The initial $20 million grant could be a stepping stone to bigger grant opportunities and partnerships for the UI, he said.
“It’s going to position us to have a significant impact on things that matter to the economy of the nation and the state,” he said.
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