CENTER FOR TRUSTWORTHY
SCIENTIFIC CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
Science and engineering are increasingly reliant on computing, digital data, interoperability, and support for collaboration. Cybersecurity is critical to ensuring the integrity and trust of scientific data as well as interoperability.
However, establishing a cybersecurity program, evaluating and choosing technologies for identity management, authentication, authorization, and auditing are major challenges. Cybersecurity should not dictate how science is done; instead it should support and enable workflows and technology choices made by science teams. Cybersecurity is not a “one size fits all” silver bullet, but instead is a process, carefully tailored to a community to create trust while impacting the work as little as possible.
CTSC will help create high-quality, trustworthy cyberinfrastructure for National Science Foundation-funded projects, particularly those utilizing grid computing.
Scientific cyberinfrastructure brings unique challenges for cybersecurity due to its open nature, use of unique instruments, large and complex data sets, and rich ecosystems of collaboration across countries and between disciplines..
NSF has as a goal the creation of high-quality, trustworthy cyberinfrastructure to support high-quality, trustworthy science. However the community faces a real challenge in accessing needed expertise in a timely fashion.
The Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastucture (CTSC) is comprised of cybersecurity experts who have spent decades working with science and engineering communities and have an established track record of usable, high-quality solutions suited to the needs of those communities. The team draws from best operational practices and includes leaders in the research and development of new methodologies and high-quality implementations.
CTSC will address this challenge for meeting the needs of individual cyberinfrastructure projects through deep engagements, training, and dissemination of experiences. At the same time, CTSC will advance the state of cybersecurity practice across the community by analyzing gaps in cybersecurity technology to provide guidance to researchers and developers, addressing the application of software assessment to complicated cyberinfrastructure software stacks, and fostering broadly the transition of cybersecurity research to practice.
Mission
The mission of CTSC is to improve the cybersecurity of NSF science and engineering projects, while allowing those projects to focus on their science endeavors.
This mission is accomplished through one-on-one engagements with projects to solve their specific problems, broad education, outreach and training to raise the practice-of-security across the community, and looking for opportunities for improvement to bring in research to raise the state-of-practice.
For more information about what CTSC does, how it can help your project, the advances it is making in cybersecurity and resources for cybersecurity professionals, please see the links on the left of the page.