NIST seen as epicenter for cybersecurity

Sen Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) would like to enhance the National Institute of Standards and Technology's role in cybersecurity.

At the Commerce Department's Symposium on Cybersecurity in the Commercial Space on July 27, Sen Mikulski detailed plans to create a "National Cybersecurity Center for Excellence," to be headquartered at NIST. The NIST National Cybersecurity Center for Excellence would serve as a cybersecurity technology transfer center for academia and industry; will help fund, what she calls, "merit-based research" into cybersecurity; and also promote leap-ahead next-generation cybersecurity technology. She included language and funding for the idea in the recently approved Commerce Department appropriations bill. She says the goal is to boost NIST's role in setting the technical standards for the equipment that will protect all of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure. "This new technology needs to be built to standards...and the standards should be and must be a United States standard, not a China standard. I believe that the country that creates the standards first, will create the products and the jobs first," she says.

The proposal to boost NIST's cybersecurity profile has been approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee as part of the Commerce Department appropriations bill. It now goes to the full Senate for consideration.