NYU-Poly Signs Master Agreement for Cybersecurity Sponsored Research

Polytechnic Institute of New York University recently signed a master agreement for sponsored research in cybersecurity with L-3 Communications.  The agreement streamlines the process by which the partners can begin research projects and speed the delivery of solutions, particularly in hardware security.

L-3’s National Security Solutions (NSS) group and NYU-Poly will jointly develop critical cybersecurity technologies such as hypervisor security solutions that enhance security and performance in the cloud and mobile realms. NYU-Poly also expects to develop research collaborations in other areas of security and beyond.

The first project, in NYU-Poly’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, will attempt to use performance tuning features of processors to detect security vulnerabilities such as rootkits in the virtualization layer of a computing system. If successful, these hardware performance counters will enhance the security of chips and computing systems at little or no cost. This project is led by an NYU-Poly PhD student Xueyang Wang working with Professor Ramesh Karri, an expert in designing secure and trustworthy hardware.

“We welcome this pioneering partnership, both because L-3 is one of the country’s foremost defense contractors and because it will speed the process of turning research into real-world protection,” said Katepalli Sreenivasan, NYU-Poly acting president and provost. “NYU-Poly engineers have been conducting pioneering research in cybersecurity, Big Data and privacy, and we look forward to working with L-3 researchers to find new solutions to rapidly emerging security issues.”

NYU-Poly was one of the first universities to introduce a cybersecurity master’s degree program, in 2009, and is designated as both a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and a Center of Academic Excellence in Research by the National Security Agency.  It is home to the National Science Foundation-funded Information Systems and Internet Security (ISIS) Laboratory.

The Sloan Consortium named NYU-Poly’s virtual graduate cyber security program the Outstanding Online Program of 2011.