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Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA)

Center Overview

The Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA) focuses on analytics and automation capabilities for efficient, accurate, and timely cyber-defense operations for complex enterprise information technology (IT), cloud and cyber-physical systems. CCAA's mission is to advance the science and state of the art of analytics and automation by developing innovative sense-making and decision-making techniques for automated adaptive cyber defense that offers minimal human involvement and with provable and measurable properties.

Today's growing use of technology is driving an exponential increase in the complexity of IT operations. The cyber-system complexity pushes the limits of manual infrastructure management and places a heavy burden on organizations and experienced enterprise administrators, and dramatically reduces overall system agility to provide protect network services. There is a great need to automate cyber defense to provide predictive analytics and proactive mitigation against sophisticated advanced persistent threats and malware attacks. As the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wrote in 2011, "Automation is one of the three interdependent building blocks of a healthy cyber ecosystem, along with interoperability and authentication."

Assuring that the configuration of devices can be known, analyzed, and managed is fundamental to emerging concepts of automated and agile defense, and such a defense is viewed as an essential mechanism for future systems. Analytics that are adaptive and robust to achieve this objective is one challenge the research community must address. CCAA's research objectives are focused on advancing cyber defense by integrating robust sense-making and adaptive decision-making for automating risk and threat mitigation and supporting proactive cybersecurity.

Universities

University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Colorado State University

View Center Website

Center Personnel

Indrakshi Ray
Center Staff
+1 970 491 7986
iray@cs.colostate.edu

Heather Richter Lipford
Site Director (UNCC)
+1 704 687 8376
Heather.Lipford@uncc.edu

Research Focus

CCAA research covers a wide range of application domains including critical infrastructure (such as financial systems, industrial control systems, and power grids), large-scale enterprise IT systems and data centers, cloud and software-defined networking, cyber-physical systems, and "internet of things" systems. CCAA research focus areas include:

Predictive analytics with the ability to learn risks and threats to the enterprise IT environment without manually inputting data. The fusion of a broad range of enterprise-related data automatically in machine-readable form supports a variety of analytics that can direct automated defensive actions.
Automating the cybersecurity architecture design and configuration based on measured properties and metrics to determine the cost-effective and resilient counter-measure deployment and course of action mitigation to minimize residual risk and time to response
Holistic systems of security and resiliency evaluation using metric-driven formal methods for quantifying the protection of security configuration and cyber-defense systems.
Formal (provable) analytics techniques for defining, verifying, and validating system requirements, such as security policies for large-scale complex systems (for example cloud data centers, software-defined networks, and smart-grid environments), and determining the effectiveness of various analytic methods.

Awards

1822118

IUCRC Phase II Colorado State University: Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation CCAA

Failure to protect systems from cyberattacks in an increasingly interconnected world has severe consequences. The Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA) with its universities, government and commercial partners will embark on the development of science and technology to protect, defend, and survive such attacks that are launched by advanced, persistent, and evolving adversaries. The multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach will provide research and technological solutions that will improve sense-making, decision making, and resiliency to sustain cyber missions in the event of cyber warfare and sophisticated cyberattacks.

CCAA with its experts in cybersecurity, formal modeling, and data-driven analytics will advance cybersecurity in multiple ways including (a) robust and scalable sense-making for dynamic and predictive cyber risk analytics using large-scale heterogeneous cyber artifacts, (b) adaptive and autonomic decision-making for creating defense strategies and courses of action that are provably correct and operationally safe using mission requirements, security policies and guidelines, and system configurations, (c) making resilience and agility inherent properties of cyber and cyber physical systems to enable real-time deterrence, deception, and mitigation. The Colorado State University (CSU) site will contribute in formal methods, cyber physical systems, machine learning, and networking.

The Center's research will advance the field of cyber security through its research in preventing, detecting, recovering, and surviving cyberattacks in a connected world and make systems safe, secure, and resilient. Technology transfer will occur through start-ups, student and faculty internships at the member organizations. Students at all levels, high-school, undergraduates, and graduates will be involved in the projects. Minority students, especially first generation, will be actively recruited. Efforts will be made to have students do internships at the industrial organizations and the partner universities.

The Center will make all the artifacts developed in this project in a central repository that will be accessible to all its members. The repository will be accessible through the Center's website (http://www.ccaa-nsf.org/). The artifacts include manuscripts, code, datasets, and experimental results. Some of these materials will also be disseminated to the public, selected external organizations conforming to the bylaws of the Center, the NSF policies, and the individual universities requirements. The repository will be available for the duration of the Phase II project, and an earnest attempt will be made to maintain the repository after the project ends.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. Read More >

1822150

Phase II IUCRC University of North Carolina Charlotte: Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation CCAA

With the increasing magnitude and sophistication of cyber attacks, cyber warfare has become a major threat to national security. However, the cybersecurity state of the art is still far from providing sufficient protection, not only for Internet enterprise services but also for critical infrastructure services, such as in the financial and energy sectors. With the exponential increase of attack surface and the complete reliance on human analysis and response, the time for detection and mitigation of cyber attacks have been significantly increasing (e.g., can take up to several months). In addition, the cost of deploying cybersecurity has been tremendously increasing as it is becoming very resource and labor intensive.

The University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) is leading the research and industry community in NSF IUCRC Center on Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation (CCAA) to address these challenges. Our goal is to build the critical mass of inter-disciplinary academic researchers, industry partners, and government agencies for advancing the science and state-of-the-art of cybersecurity analytics and automation by developing innovative sense-making and decision-making capabilities for autonomous and adaptive cyber defense that requires minimal human involvement with provable and measurable security and resiliency properties. We consider both formal- and data-driven analytics of cybersecurity artifacts for seamlessly integrating sense-making and decision-making for adaptive and autonomous cyber defense.

CCAA brings together experts in formal and data-driven cybersecurity to advance cyber defense on multiple fronts, namely, (a) developing dynamic and predictive cyber risk analytics using heterogeneous cyber artifacts, (b) developing adaptive and autonomic decision-making for provably correct and safe defense strategies according to the mission requirements, and system configurations and (c) integrating cyber resilience and agility as inherent properties of cyber and cyber-physical system security. The UNC Charlotte site will lead the research and management activities and provides profound technical contributions to CCAA in formal methods for configuration verification, automated risk quantification and mitigation, adaptive learning, cyber threat analytics, and cyber agility.

The Center will create and maintain a center-wide repository to make all products of the research ? datasets, code, tools, experimental results, draft manuscripts, etc. ? available to all Center?s members. The repository will be accessible through the Center?s website (http://www.ccaa-nsf.org/). Consistently with the Center?s bylaws and with any applicable NSF or individual universities? requirements, several of these products will be made available to the broader research and industry community. The repository will be actively maintained during the duration of the Phase II effort, and it can be accessed online.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. Read More >

Member Organizations

IUCRC affiliated member organizations are displayed as submitted by the Center. Non-federal organizations are not selected, approved, or otherwise endorsed by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the Center author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.