NCSA Cybersecurity Directorate

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Observatory Middleware Framework (OMF)

Sensor networks attached to observatories such as the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS) perform such tasks as observing and recording bioluminescent deep-sea creatures found nearly 3,000 feet below sea level, like this seadevil. Deployed as part of MARS, the Observatory Middleware Framework (OMF), the result of a collaboration between CSD staff at NCSA and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, is intended to help eliminate the need for observatories to build their own separate, customized, secure data generation and publication mechanisms.

Read more.

Who we are

The Cybersecurity Directorate at NCSA is composed of researchers, developers, and network security specialists who work to advance the state of the art of cybersecurity, apply those advances to key science, engineering, government, and law enforcement user communities, and protect NCSA's networks and substantial computing resources.

NCSA Cybersecurity provides leadership for the The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research, a collaboration between NCSA, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science to advance the state of the art in security for our nation's critical infrastructure.

The Cybersecurity Directorate also includes NCSA's Security Operations Team. This group is responsible for incident response and production security at NCSA.

Our Mission

• Design, develop, and apply unique, state-of-the-art trustworthy cyberinfrastructure to meet real world needs in science, engineering, law enforcement, and critical infrastructure.
• Research and develop security solutions to meet community requirements when solutions are not available.
• Develop a balance between security and usability tailored to the needs of each user community.
• Maintain the security of NCSA cyberresources and digital data.

Security at NCSA

NCSA has been researching, developing, and deploying cybersecurity solutions for two decades. Find out more.

Contacts

For more information, contact Randy Butler (rbutler@ncsa.uiuc.edu) or Von Welch (vwelch@ncsa.uiuc.edu), Cybersecurity Co-Directors.

News

News Archives

• 10/14/2009: NCSA Cybersecurity funded to develop cybersecurity plan for GENI. Adam Slagell and Von Welch are part of the latest round of GENI funding to develop an operational security plan for the NSF GENI project.

• 10/13/2009: We're hiring visiting research programmers. Search closes October 27 (extended from October 9).

• 8/28/2009: NCSA researchers receive NSF grant to deploy cyberinfrastructure logon service

• 6/29/2009: NCSA researchers receive NSF grant for cyberinfrastructure security software

• 4/2/2009: The Observatory Middleware Framework (OMF) project is a collaboration between the Monterey Bay Research Institute (MBARI) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. In April 2009, OMF reached a major project milestone with a demonstration at INGRID 2009 in Sardinia, Italy.

Working with Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity Professionals

We have a number of collaborations with law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals and have developed a number of cybersecurity tools designed for those communities, including Secure Email List Service (SELS), Cyberinvestigation Law Enforcement Wizard (CLEW), Framework for Log Anonymization and Information Management (FLAIM) and Palantir.

Security for CyberInfrastructure

Our Security for CyberInfrastructure page contains a number of our tools for securing cyberenvironments, including MyProxy, GSI-OpenSSH and GridShib.

We also have a set of Grid Security HowTos to help users with our tools and other technology.

Partnerships

	NCSA Cybersecurity staff are proud members of the University of Illinois' Information Trust Institute.
	NCSA is a leader in grid security and one of the members of the Globus Alliance.

Other NCSA Cybersecurity sites

• NCSA Public Key Infrastructure: The NCSA PKI provides NCSA and TeraGrid users with security credentials for grid computing and single sign-on.

• NCSA PKI Lab: NCSA PKI Laboratory hosts a variety of PKI Equipment that allows us to evaluate solutions and systems.

• MyProxy: MyProxy is NCSA's open-source X.509 credential management solution, deployed at over 200 sites world-wide.

• Old Projects Page: Our old project page.