About cylab
CyLab is one of the largest university-based cybersecurity education and research centers in the U.S. CyLab is multi-disciplinary and university-wide, involving six colleges from Carnegie Mellon, 50 plus faculty and over 130 graduate students. CyLab is located in the Collaborative Innovation Center and is supported by both public and private funding, predominantly government research funds and the support of our partners. Our goal is to build mutually-beneficial public-private partnerships to develop new technologies for measurable, available, secure, trustworthy, and sustainable computing and communications systems and to educate individuals at all levels.
CyLab provides technology resources and expertise in four areas:
- Technology transfer to and from the public sector
- Technology transfer to and from the private sector
- Development of Information Assurance professionals
- National awareness programs and tools
1. Technology Transfer: The Public Sector
Joint Project with Government Agencies
Fluid Software Assurance Tool is an experimentally-applied software assurance tool for large-scale (200KLOC+) deployed production Java software. Working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the project identified several dozen race conditions errors, and repaired them without introducing any new faults or errors.
A collaboration with the Idaho National Laboratory, a new attack surface measurement method for critical software systems was developed to project INL's critical systems.
MERIT (Management and Education on the Risk of Insider Threats) delivers methods and tools that help managers to understand the potential near-term and long-term insider threat risk to their organization, quantitatively analyze tradeoffs associated with alternative approaches to mitigate this risk, and communicate risks and mitigations with others in their organization. The tools were developed in collaboration with the DoD Personnel Security Research Center and DoD CounterIntelligence Field Agency (CIFA)
PASIS (Perpetually Available and Secure Information Systems) is a general survivable storage system that enables experimentation with different mechanisms for data encoding and distribution. Working with AFRL Jont Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) researchers, PASIS was evaluated and chosen to replace existing JBI software.
2. Technology Transfer: The Private Sector
Joint Projects with Private Sector Companies
Selective Obfuscation of Enterprise Data- technical report (pdf)
VANETS (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks) - technical report (pdf)
Spin-off Companies
SureLogic
The company supplies tools for software engineers developing complex and critical applications; provides advanced bug-finding, analysis and verification; empowers development teams to deliver reliable and powerful applications.Greenback Systems
The company provides licensed Grey smartphone technology which allows users to securely exercise and/or delegate authority for accessing physical and virtual spaces. BiometriCore Inc. The company produces commercial face and iris recognition technology and provides face and iris software development kits. The technology is used by U.S. government for surveillance in airports and critical infrastructure locations.
3. Information Assurance Professionals
Our goal is to build a national supply of experts in Information Assurance. We offer both PhD and MS programs with over 150 PhD students to date. CyLab has developed an intensive, month-long, in-residence summer program to help build Information Assurance education and research capacity at colleges and universities designated as Minority Serving Institutions – including, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). This program is supported through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
The Information Assurance Capacity Building Program has yielded significant results - new courses, new papers, new certifications and even a new center for excellence. Additionally, CyLab participates in the Federal Cyber Corps Scholarship for Service Program, a program providing full financial assistance to a few highly qualified applicants each year pursuing graduate degrees in information security at the Information Networking Institute and the Heinz College.
4. National Awareness Programs and Tools
CyLab provides web-based public access tools to raise national awareness of cybersecurity in the areas of internet-user awareness and child protection.