NSA hosts researchers from six Science and Security Privacy initiative ‘lablets’

The National Security Agency (NSA) recently hosted researchers from “lablets” taking part in its Science of Security and Privacy (SoS) initiative, which advances the design of trusted systems across disciplines ranging from computer science to behavioral science.

Since its launch in 2012, the NSA’s SoS initiative has advanced security and privacy science as a recognized field of research. Most recently, the University of Kansas, Vanderbilt University, and the International Computer Science Institute joined were named SoS lablets. The three original lablets were Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Illinois-Champaign and North Carolina State University.

“The NSA SoS lablets will focus on the discovery of formal underpinnings of the design of trusted systems which spans the disciplines of computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, behavioral science, statistics, philosophy, public policy and physics,” an NSA release stated.

The multidisciplinary lablets have launched 20 projects that address challenges in cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity metrics, policy-governed secure collaboration, privacy, resilient architectures, scalability and composability, and understanding and accounting for human behavior.

More than 300 universities across the country have applied to be SoS lablets. The scientific rigor or research projects, timeliness of challenges being addressed, and advancement of existing efforts to build security and privacy in the scientific community are among the selection criteria.