Boston University Secures $10M Frontier Award on Cloud Security

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program announced a $10 million  Frontier award to Boston University’s Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project. MACS is one of  two new center-scale “Frontier” awards to support large, multi-institution projects that address grand challenges in cybersecurity science and engineering with the potential for broad economic and scientific impact.

Led by Ran Canetti (Professor of Computer Science and Director of The Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security at the Hariri Institute), the research team is comprised of experts in different aspects of information security and cryptography. The research is highly collaborative and pools together key areas of expertise in order to provide overall security guarantees. A key component of the project is the Massachusetts Open Cloud, which provides the research team with a test-bed for deploying and testing the developed mechanisms in a production cloud.

The goal of the MACS project is to develop methods for building information systems with meaningful multi-layered security guarantees. Arguably, reasoning about all the security aspects of systems “in one blow” is not feasible. The approach we take is thus modular: We aim at systems that are built from smaller and separable functional components, where the security of each component is asserted individually, and where security of the system as a whole can be derived from the security of its components.

Read the NSF Press Release.

Read the BU Today Article.

Visit the MACS Project Description for more details.