The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has formed an alliance with Carnegie Mellon, Penn State University, the UC Riverside, UC Davis, and Indiana University, to develop a new science of how to make security-relevant decisions in cyberspace.

The five-year funding for the program is $23.2 million, with an additional $25 million for the optional five-year extension, a potential total of $48.2 million over the 10-year collaboration. Patrick McDaniel, professor of computer science and engineering at Penn State, is the principal investigator on the project, titled Models for Enabling Continuous Reconfigurability of Secure Missions.

The alliance will focus on detecting adversaries and attacks in the cyberspace, measuring and managing risk, and altering the environment to achieve best results at the least cost. A fourth area, developing models of human behaviors and capabilities that enable understanding and predicting motivations and actions of users, defenders and attackers, will be integrated into the first three areas.

[Image courtesy: Army Research Laboratory]