Professor Alan Sherman received two research awards from the National Science Foundation to support work at UMBC on cybersecurity.

Sherman is a co-principal investigator on a two year, $300K Eager award to foster research cooperation among four successful and mature Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research: Purdue University, UMBC, UC Davis, and Mississippi State. The project will provide opportunities for students to work on problems proposed and mentored by practitioners in the real world rather than just faculty led research. As a result, more pressing and urgent problems will be addressed, the students will benefit from the guidance of multiple and interdisciplinary research faculty from multiple institutions and the student-lead research may produce solutions for pressing national problems.

Professor Sherman also received a supplement of $271K to his UMBC Cybersecurity SFS Program award to support graduate research assistants who will work on two new projects. One will develop new algorithms for verifiable randomness that can generate random bits in a way that the recipients will have verifiably high assurance that the bits were generated in a truly random fashion. The work will improve upon the (unverifiable) NIST random beacon project. The second project will develop a new security education game, inspired by the UMBC-developed classroom game SecurityEmpire, to be fielded as a Facebook application for free use by anyone. This is joint work with UMBC faculty Marc Olano and Linda Oliva.

The research will be carried out in the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance under Professor Sherman’s supervision.