About Trusted CI

Science and engineering are increasingly reliant on computing, digital data, interoperability, and support for collaboration. Cybersecurity is critical to ensuring the integrity and trust of scientific data as well as interoperability.

However, establishing a cybersecurity program, evaluating and choosing technologies for identity management, authentication, authorization, and auditing are major challenges. Cybersecurity should not dictate how science is done; instead it should support and enable workflows and technology choices made by science teams. Cybersecurity is not a “one size fits all” silver bullet, but instead is a process, carefully tailored to a community to create trust while impacting the work as little as possible.

Scientific cyberinfrastructure brings unique challenges for cybersecurity due to its open nature, use of unique instruments, large and complex data sets, and rich ecosystems of collaboration across countries and between disciplines.

NSF has as a goal the creation of high-quality, trustworthy cyberinfrastructure to support high-quality, trustworthy science. However the community faces a real challenge in accessing needed expertise in a timely fashion.

Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is comprised of cybersecurity experts who have spent decades working with science and engineering communities and have an established track record of usable, high-quality solutions suited to the needs of those communities. The team draws from best operational practices and includes leaders in the research and development of new methodologies and high-quality implementations.

Trusted CI addresses the challenge for meeting the needs of individual cyberinfrastructure projects through deep engagements, training, and dissemination of experiences. At the same time, Trusted CI advances the state of cybersecurity practice across the community by analyzing gaps in cybersecurity technology to provide guidance to researchers and developers, addressing the application of software assessment to complicated cyberinfrastructure software stacks, and fostering broadly the transition of cybersecurity research to practice.

Mission

The mission of Trusted CI is to enable trustworthy NSF science by partnering with cyberinfrastructure (CI) operators to build and maintain effective cybersecurity programs, publishing resources that are valuable to the broader NSF community, and supporting the processes, tools, and knowledge to secure NSF research progress.

This mission is accomplished through one-on-one engagements with projects to address their specific challenges; education, outreach, and training to raise the state of security practice across the scientific enterprise; and leadership on bringing the best and most relevant cybersecurity research to bear on the NSF cyberinfrastructure research community.