Langevin Applauds URI Cybersecurity Grant

Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI), who cofounded the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, today commended the University of Rhode Island on receiving $502,097 from the National Science Foundation to enhance education opportunities in computer network security at the high school and college levels. The funds will allow URI, under the direction of Professor Victor Fay-Wolfe, who heads the Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center, to create software that better educates and tests students’ cybersecurity skills.

Langevin, one of Congress’ leaders in the effort to strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity, has made it a priority to ensure Rhode Island has the chance to take advantage of a rapidly growing field that can create quality jobs in the state, while meeting an urgent national security need. The URI program complements the Cyber Foundations Competition that he launched in Rhode Island in late 2010 to introduce high school students to the field and get them excited about careers in cybersecurity.

Earlier this year, URI was designated as an NSA/DHS Center of Excellence in Intelligence Assurance Education. Langevin particularly noted the commitment to the field by URI President David Dooley; Dr. Peter Alfonso, Vice President of Research and Economic Development; and Dr. Victor Fay-Wolfe.

“No matter how we act to strengthen network security policies, we cannot have effective cybersecurity without a highly skilled workforce, and right now there is a significant shortage of qualified professionals” said Langevin. “The University of Rhode Island, under the outstanding leadership of President Dooley, Dr. Alfonso, and Professor Wolfe, is setting a national standard in cyber education and giving Rhode Island an opportunity to excel in the field. This grant will take advantage of the expertise at the Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center to improve cyber training across the nation.”

Underscoring the urgency of building up cyber training programs and the opportunity to create cybersecurity jobs in Rhode Island, a former member of President Obama's cybersecurity commission recently noted that the government needs to hire at least 10,000 experts in the near future, and that the private sector needs four times that number. Meanwhile, the head of US Cyber Command has said that a large-scale attack on the country's critical networks is “coming our way…You can see this statistically; the number of attacks is growing.”

Grant Description

The University’s project creates an open-source cyber challenge software platform (OCCP) and accompanying educational and assessment materials that are designed to be widely disseminated for teaching high school and college information assurance, cyber security, and digital forensics courses. The project consists of activities to design the OCCP using free/low cost software packaged in a standard way for public release; to create instances of the OCCP for network defense courses, penetration testing courses, and secure programming courses; to create supplemental educational materials for use with the OCCP instances in these courses; to assess the effectiveness of the use of OCCP in these courses; and to hold workshops and create a web portal for wide dissemination of educational materials, and for community contributions to the OCCP.

The result of this project represents a controlled teaching and assessment environment where students apply information assurance, cyber security, and digital forensics concepts in orchestrated pedagogically-sound realistic scenarios. The OCCP is easy and inexpensive to install and as such provides a starting point that instructors can deploy to save substantial effort, and yet still tailor to their specific needs. Furthermore, it provides a framework with a software architecture and “packaging” that is meant to be shared, modified, extended, and re-used to facilitate the development of an open source community that uses, supports, and extends the OCCP.