Category: Current Projects

This NSA granted curriculum development project focuses on two security areas: Enterprise Risk and Mobile Security.

Motivation and Background
With the rapidly increasing role of technology in society and the  increasing cybersecurity threat,  industry and government have a great need to scale cybersecurity leadership and governance.  In turn, there is a great need for educators to scale cybersecurity leadership and governance education and training.

Design
The courses are multidisciplinary, covering leadership and management, technical and engineering and policy.

Course I: Enterprise Risk Management and Cybersecurity Governance

The course provides an introduction and overview of the changing nature of cybersecurity risk management and cybersecurity governance.

Main Topics

• Technology Innovation, Adoption and the Changing Nature of Cybersecurity Risk
• Enterprise Risk Management, Cybersecurity Governance and Cybersecurity Strategy
• Legal and Compliance Landscape
• Roles of Boards and CISOs
• Benchmarking, Information Asset Classification and Developing a Consensus of Cybersecurity Risks
• Developing a Cybersecurity Strategy and Risk Mitigation Program
• Enterprise Risk and Cybersecurity Frameworks
• Role and Considerations for Cybersecurity Insurance

Learning Outcomes

• Describe the cybersecurity risks resulting from new and rapidly developing technologies such as IoT, Cloud and mobile and analyze and describe the changing nature of the cybersecurity threat
• Explain the complementary roles of enterprise risk management, cybersecurity governance and cybersecurity strategy
• Discuss the evolving role of Boards and executive committees in enterprise risk management and cybersecurity and the evolving role of the CISO
• Analyze cybersecurity governance in recent major cybersecurity compromises such as OPM
• Apply cybersecurity lifecycle and the elements of identify, protect, detect, respond and recover
• Outline the process and considerations for developing a cybersecurity strategy and risk mitigation program including benchmarking and information asset classification

Course II: Mobile Cybersecurity Management

This course provides an introduction and overview of the rapidly changing enterprise mobility environment, associated cybersecurity risks and approaches for developing a mobile cybersecurity strategy.

Main Topics

• Mobility and Organization Strategy
• The Changing Landscape of Mobile Technologies -from Smart Phones and Tablets to IoT
• Mobile Policies and BYOD
• Leadership and Governance for Mobile Security
• Rapidly Evolving Mobile Device Management Technologies
• Mobile Life Cycle Management
• Cybersecurity Risk Framework and Mobile

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the evolving nature and capability of mobile technologies
• Understand mobile security risk including endpoint, network and process/policy
• Evaluate mobile cybersecurity policy and BYOD alternatives in light of organization’s cyber strategy
• Understand and evaluate new mobile device management technologies
• Understand and apply the mobile device life cycle to mobile strategy
• Outline the process and considerations and apply to developing a mobile cybersecurity strategy

Contacts

Dr. J.P. Auffret

jauffret@gmu.edu

703-993-5641                            

The objective of this NSF-funded project (NSF Award #1623653) is to develop and provide focused and context specific cybersecurity leadership education and training for city and county governments.

The threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has been well-recognized in the data networking world for two decades. Such attacks are orchestrated by sets of networked hosts that collectively act to disrupt or deny access to information, communications or computing capabilities, generally by exhausting critical resources such as bandwidth, processor capacity or memory of targeted resources. The nature of DDoS attacks can span a wide range. Botnet-induced volumetric attacks, which can generate hundreds of gigabits per second of malicious traffic, are perhaps the best-known form of DDoS. However, low-volume DDoS attacks can be even more pernicious and problematic from a defensive standpoint. Such attacks target specific applications, protocols or state-machine behaviors while relying on traffic sparseness (or seemingly innocuous message transmission) to evade traditional intrusion-detection techniques.

The current art in DDoS defense generally relies on combinations of network-based filtering, traffic diversion and ”scrubbing” or replication of stored data (or the logical points of connectivity used to access the data) to dilute volumetric attacks and/or to provide diverse access for legitimate users. In general, these existing approaches fall well short of desired capabilities in terms of response times, the ability to identify and to thwart low-volume DDoS, the ability to stop DDoS within encrypted traffic and the need to defend real-time transactional services such as those associated with cloud computing and military command and control.

DARPA’s Extreme DDoS Defense (XD3) program will focus on three broad areas of opportunity to improve resilience against DDoS attacks. The program aims to thwart DDoS attacks by: (1) dispersing cyber assets (physically and/or logically) to complicate adversarial targeting; (2) disguising the characteristics and behaviors of those assets through networked maneuver to confuse or deceive the adversary; and (3) using adaptive mitigation techniques on endpoints (e.g., mission-critical servers) to blunt the effects of attacks that succeed in penetrating other defensive measures. This research program will include formulation of new algorithms, demonstrations and field exercises with software prototypes, development of performance metrics to assess effectiveness and integration of systems across the three aforementioned areas to maximize overall defensive capabilities.

The main goal of the project is to enhance the cyber security of digital devices, such as Embedded and Mission‐Specific Devices (EMSD), by developing a monitor capable of detecting attackers by analyzing involuntary analog emissions across a variety of modalities, including power consumption, electromagnetic, and acoustic emissions.