Can Researchers Influence Government's Cybersecurity Agenda?

Government, academic and private sector cybersecurity experts met last month at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) headquarters to establish a research agenda that may affect America’s developing cybersecurity research approach.

The Cyber Security Research Alliance (CSRA) and NIST hosted a two-day workshop on April 4th and 5th in Gaithersburg (MD) focused on addressing the threats and vulnerabilities in technology that supports critical infrastructure operations like the country’s food, power and communications networks. The alliance has collaborated with NIST, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce, since 2012 to help organizations in multiple sectors prioritize their own threat research and mediation tactics. The workshop was the latest step in that mission. “It’s the beginning of the beginning, and clearly, what we hope to come out of this workshop will be an agenda and identification of high priority initiatives that could be undertaken in the research arena to address these barriers to cybersecurity that exist in legacy systems today,” said Lee Holcomb, CSRA president. The collaborators hope to publish their agenda by the end of May.