The US National Security Agency wants to strengthen ties with tech-heavy universities.
The NSA is looking to strengthen its ties with US colleges and universities, and co-ordinate academic collaboration to best protect internet infrastructure. The initiative will build on the past three years of its “Science of Security” programme.
Over the course of these past three years, the agency has already given almost three hundred university departments the opportunity to receive funding to set up small laboratories, called lablets, in partnership with private industry and NSA.
Academic specialists from Carnegie Mellon University, Illinois University, Maryland University and North Carolina University visited the NSA’s headquarters in February, meeting with researchers and specialists from the agency’s Research Directorate.
The lablets will tackle five core issues: scalability and composability, policy-governed secure collaboration, security metrics, resilient architectures and understanding, and accounting for human behavior. According to the NSA, the goal is a collaboration on topics of mutual interest in the name of internet security.
The lablets and academic co-operation are an interesting step for the NSA, as America’s intelligence agencies have so far heavily relied on venture capital firm In-Q-Tel whose sole purpose it is to identify and invest in companies that will keep the agencies equipped with the latest in information technology.
Image: NSA Headquarters