This SGER proposes to define and develop grand challenges for cyber security. Over the past 10 years, the Federal Government, including NSF, DARPA, NSA, and the DoD laboratories have invested over $100M in cyber security research. In spite of some success stories on particular research or innovations, the number of attacks and their severity are increasing and the specter of very severe attacks remains. In other words, the pace of innovation in defense has lagged the pace of innovation in the offense and the expectation is for this trend increasing.
It is anticipated that the ongoing research will help improve the situation, but a focus on solving a grand challenge will likely energize the computer security community to focus on real defenses. The PI believes that by defining and developing one or more grand challenges in Cyber Security, this work can be leveraged by current and future research to demonstrate progress and ultimately success in achieving grand challenges with significant benefits to society.
This proposal identifies ground work for grand challenges by defining, articulating, and designing the grand challenge problems themselves. It proposes a number of candidate problems, taken from host, network and applications -- all of which have security needs. It also identifies the criteria for a successful grand challenge and approaches to engage the security community (including academia, industry, and Government) in the grand challenge exercise.
