CICI: RSSD: A Vulnerability Modeling Approach Toward Secure Scientific Cyber-Infrastructures

Scientific cyber-infrastructures play a crucial role in facilitating scientific research and discovery by providing advanced data management capabilities. This research project aims to fortify the cybersecurity of data-intensive scientific cyber-infrastructures, safeguarding valuable scientific data and preserving research integrity. To achieve this objective, the project aims to form a cybersecurity coalition among institutions within the state of North Carolina, promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Comprehensive cybersecurity incident data is collected within the coalition using advanced tools that gather information on incident types, timestamps, locations, active security policies, and impact levels. The collected data is utilized to model typical vulnerabilities encountered in data-intensive systems, enabling proactive vulnerability management and improving the incident response.

This project impacts a wide community of scholars that conduct research through the application of a variety of data-intensive scientific cyber-infrastructures. Also, the research methodology developed in this project can be used to safeguard other scientific cyber-infrastructures.

This project leverages a cybersecurity knowledge graph (CSKG) to model and integrate the collected data. The CSKG incorporates data from the coalition as well as authoritative sources such as the National Vulnerability Database, Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization and Open-Source Vulnerability Database. Advanced natural language processing techniques and deep learning models are developed to process the generated data and construct the CSKG.

By representing the scientific cyber-infrastructure as a directed graph, the CSKG we provide an intuitive visualization and effective querying, revealing intricate relationships between vulnerabilities, attacks and affected systems. This research endeavor will establish North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University as a leader in cybersecurity research and education.

Through the cybersecurity coalition collaboration, valuable insights and best practices are shared, fostering a collective effort to strengthen the security posture of scientific cyber-infrastructures.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.