Welcome to Our New Advisory Committee Members!

In support of our expanded mission, Trusted CI is thrilled to welcome Damian Clarke, Ph.D. and Manish Parashar, Ph.D. to the Trusted CI Advisory Committee. Dr. Clarke rejoins the Advisory Committee after 2 years serving as special advisor to the program. His experiences in leadership positions at universities and university consortia, particularly in the U.S. Southeast, will be particularly valuable to Trusted CI as it works to further engage with institutions of higher education to determine how best to address the cybersecurity requirements of research security. Dr. Parashar brings a wealth of experience related to national cyberinfrastructure and artificial intelligence. We look forward to his input on our new AI initiatives and helping to define our future strategy to support the community with the secure use of AI technologies.

In addition to Drs. Clarke and Parashar, we wish to express our gratitude to the entire Advisory Committee for the guidance they provide and for sharing their time and insights to maximize the value of Trusted CI’s programs to the communities we serve.

Cybersecurity Center of Excellence Receives Five-Year, $6M/Year Award From NSF

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a five-year, $6-million per-year award to run through September 2029. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will now serve as Trusted CI’s central steward.

Trusted CI empowers trustworthy discovery and innovation funded by NSF by partnering with cyberinfrastructure (CI) operators to build and maintain effective cybersecurity programs that secure the progress of NSF-funded research. The center started in 2012 and consists of a multi-institutional, cross-functional team that addresses the complex challenges facing the NSF’s cyberinfrastructure research ecosystem. 

Read more in the press release.

To learn more about the Trusted CI Framework, the NSF Cybersecurity Summit, regional Summits, and Trusted CI’s other activities and resources, please read this expanded announcement and learn more on expanded announcement.

Feedback Requested on Trusted CI Five-Year Strategic Plan

NSF cyberinfrastructure is an engine of scientific research and innovation and underlies much of the science that Major Facilities enable. Key cyberinfrastructure components, including supercomputers, data repositories, sensor arrays, ships, software systems, and telescopes, are essential to scientific productivity, such that cybersecurity incidents can have a major impact on the scientific enterprise. For the cyberinfrastructure operators, implementing effective cybersecurity programs for these unique components is a complex challenge.

Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE), has been working to overcome this challenge for over ten years. Its success has been noted both by the NSF community and the former director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. The 2021 JASON Report on Cybersecurity at Major Facilities indicated Trusted CI's demonstrable impact on improving the cybersecurity posture of many NSF Major Facilities.

In light of new and unprecedented challenges facing our community, Trusted CI is making a new strategic plan for the next five years, with a vision of secure operation of essential cyberinfrastructure enabling NSF’s vision of a nation that leads the world in scientific research and innovation. This plan will guide the creation of our renewal proposal.

We are seeking input on our strategic plan from key constituencies including our Advisory Committee and NSF Major Facilities representatives and welcome insights from the broader community as well. Please click the link below to view our five-year strategic plan covering 2024-2029 and provide feedback via email to kelshute@iu.edu. 

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8193607 

Thank you in advance for your thoughtful feedback and insights!

Announcement of Trusted CI Director Transition

Dear Trusted CI community, friends, and partners,

After 10 years of directing Trusted CI, I am stepping down as Trusted CI Director today. I thank all of you for your support over the past decade - you have made my job both a huge privilege and a pleasure. I also extend my gratitude to NSF for providing this unique opportunity.

I’m excited to share that Jim Basney has agreed to accept the role of Trusted CI Director. Jim has served as Trusted CI’s Deputy Director for the past three years and has been part of its leadership team since its inception. I suspect most of you already know Jim and will join me in my optimism that Jim will serve as an excellent leader for Trusted CI’s second decade.

I thank Jim for his contributions as deputy, which I found invaluable, and I’m happy to also share that Jim will receive similar support from Sean Peisert, who has agreed to serve as Trusted CI Deputy Director going forward. Since Sean joined Trusted CI in 2019 he has made strong leadership contributions, including serving as a co-PI the last year  and leading annual challenges and the OSCRP effort.

Kelli Shute will be staying on as Executive Director and has my thanks for her contributions in this role both past and into the future. Jim, Sean, and Kelli will be supported by the rest of the current leadership team: Kathy Benninger, Professor Bart Miller, and Mark Krenz.

I ask you to join me in congratulating Jim and Sean, and providing them and the rest of the team with the same support and collaboration going forward which you extended to me over the past decade. You can contact Jim and Sean directly at jbasney@illinois.edu and sppeisert@lbl.gov.

While my stepping down as Trusted CI Director is part of a larger life change I am making in that I will be leaving Indiana University at the end of the month, I will remain involved with Trusted CI to support this transition. 

Thank you, it has been an honor.

Von

Thank you and congratulations to Dana Brunson!

Dana Brunson joined Trusted CI in 2019 as a co-PI and was instrumental in developing and leading Trusted CI’s very successful Fellows program. Her proposal to create a Center of Excellence in workforce development was recently awarded. As a result, she is stepping away from Trusted CI to focus on her role as PI for the new Center of Excellence.

We wish Dana the best of luck with her new Center of Excellence and look forward to identifying opportunities to continue to collaborate.

Von

Trusted CI PI and Director

Thank you and congratulations to Florence Hudson!

Florence Hudson has been leading Trusted CI's transition to practice (TTP) efforts since 2018. She has been instrumental in fostering connections between researchers and practitioners and leading the creation of a suite of TTP resources based on best practices and successes. September 30th marks Florence's last day with Trusted CI and we wish Florence all the best in her role as Executive Director for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub.

Ryan Kiser has been working closely with Florence on TTP and will assume leadership of Trusted CI's TTP effort, supported by Sean Peisert, who brings a strong history of both research and practice in cybersecurity.

Von

Trusted CI PI and Director

Welcoming Kelli Shute as Trusted CI’s Executive Director

I am happy to announce that Kelli Shute, who joined IU CACR and Trusted CI as a project manager last year, has accepted the role of Executive Director for Trusted CI. During her time, Kelli has demonstrated great leadership in keeping the 30 individuals across six sites that contribute to Trusted CI day-to-day, and our growing set of partners, moving forward in an effective, coordinated manner. Kelli will work closely with myself as the PI and Director, Jim Basney as Trusted CI’s Deputy Director, and the other co-PIs and leadership team.

Please join me in congratulating and welcoming Kelli in her new role.

Von Welch

Trusted CI Director and PI

Trusted CI policies for managing information that you share with us

Trusted CI greatly values the trust the community has in us. That trust enables the sharing of your experiences with us knowing we’ll treat what is shared with appropriate respect and confidence. We also recognize that you look to us to synergize experiences and lessons broadly, serving the community as a knowledge hub and allowing all of us to build on each other's knowledge. Hence, Trusted CI seeks to balance two principles:

1. Trusted CI controls the management and distribution of confidential data such that community members are comfortable sharing such data with Trusted CI during the course of collaborations, engagements, etc.
2. Trusted CI seeks to share information broadly with the community to facilitate learning from common experiences.

As Trusted CI has grown and matured, we have recognized the need to mature our processes to ensure we live up to these principles, and our processes to do so are well understood by both Trusted CI team members and our collaborators. To that end we have published two new policies we adhere to:

• Document Labeling Policy - how we label documents to manage their distribution.
• Collaborator Information Policy - how we treat information you share with us and how you can make your desires for confidentiality clear.

We are making these policies public along with the rest of our cybersecurity program to promote your trust and provide examples for others to use. As always, we recognize the expertise in the community and welcome your feedback and suggestions.

Trusted CI Incident Response Report 2019-10-02_01

As I discussed during my presentation at the NSF Cybersecurity Summit in October, Trusted CI inadvertently exposed an embargoed engagee report earlier this year. Our first time doing incident response as a project also revealed some weaknesses in our response planning that could have been problematic for a more serious incident.

With the approval of the impacted engagee, we are now making our internal report on the incident and our plans to improve public. Please find the URL to the report at the bottom of this blog post.

The community’s trust in us is paramount and we hope this transparency helps you maintain that trust in us. We welcome questions and suggestions.

Von Welch, Trusted CI Director


Trusted CI Incident Response Report 2019-10-02_01
Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/24845

Report Summary

A Trusted CI engagement report with the Singularity team at Sylabs was inadvertently published prematurely due to miscommunication within the Trusted CI team. A secondary leak was discovered in the resume of a Trusted CI team member and weaknesses were discovered in the incident response process of Trusted CI. This report describes these events and the steps Trusted CI took in responding. An analysis of those events follows along with a set of planned remediations by Trusted CI to avoid a future incident and strengthen Trusted CI’s incident response processes.

PSC Updates

Shane, Kathy, and Andrew at the 2019 NSF Cybersecurity Summit

Following Jim Marsteller's departure from Trusted CI, we are pleased to welcome two new Trusted CI team members from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Kathy Benninger, PSC's Manager of Networking Research, is our new lead for the Large Facilities Security Team (LFST) and is Trusted CI's new site lead for PSC. Kathy is already actively engaged with Trusted CI leadership and planning for 2020. We also look forward to January when Shane Filus, PSC Security Engineer, will join the Trusted CI team. Kathy and Shane both strengthen our connections to XSEDE.

Lastly, we are grateful for the continued participation in Trusted CI by PSC's Andrew Adams, who is taking on the role of Trusted CI's Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

Trusted CI renewed through 2024

We're extremely happy to announce that Trusted CI has been renewed as the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence through 2024 under NSF award 1920430. We thank the community for their support in this endeavor and look forward to our continued collaboration to advance the trustworthy nature of NSF science.

For more information, please see the press releases from Indiana University, NCSA and U. of Wisconsin, as well as other press coverage: Indianapolis Business Journal, HPCWire, Indiana Daily Student.

Trusted CI co-PI Jim Marsteller heading to Penn State University

With both excitement and sadness, I share with the Trusted CI community that Jim Marsteller, one of Trusted CI’s founders and a long-time leader of the NSF Cybersecurity Summit Program Committee and the Large Facility Security Team, will be leaving Trusted CI as part of moving from PSC to Penn State in September.

We’re excited for Jim in his new role at Penn State and wish him all the best. We are very glad that he is staying in the higher education family that is so important to Trusted CI’s mission of supporting research and look forward to continuing to work with Jim in his new role.

Please stay tuned for more news on how Trusted CI will adapt to this change of leadership.

Von - Trusted CI PI and Director

Jim Basney appointed as Trusted CI Deputy Director

I’m happy to announce that as of March 15th, Jim Basney is serving as Trusted CI’s Deputy Director. In this role, Jim will work closely with me to manage Trusted CI’s many activities as well as help with outreach to the research community. Jim has been with Trusted CI since its inception and has more than two decades of experience working with the research community. He is an internationally recognized leader in open science identity and access management, and leads the CILogon project.

It’s my pleasure to officially welcome Jim into this new role at Trusted CI.

Von Welch, Director, Trusted CI

Change of CTSC co-PI and Thank you to Randy Butler

It is with some regret that I announce Randy Butler stepping away from CTSC. Randy Butler has been a CTSC co-PI since CTSC's inception in 2012 and led the Scientific Software Security Innovation Institute Workshops that led to the concepts and documented the community requirements that were the foundation of CTSC.

I wish Randy all the best with his promotion to Senior Associate Director for Integrated Cyberinfrastructure at NCSA.

Jim Basney, already a CTSC co-PI, will be the lead for CTSC activities at NCSA. Bart Miller, currently CTSC senior personnel from the University of Wisconsin, will be taking on a co-PI role in CTSC. Bart’s new role recognizes his strong contributions to software security and training, and CTSC’s growing emphasis on software assurance.

Von