Towards cyber operations - The new role of academic cyber security research and education

Abstract

The shift towards cyber operations represents a shift not only for the defense establishments worldwide but also cyber security research and education. Traditionally cyber security research and education has been founded on information assurance, expressed in underlying subfields such as forensics, network security, and penetration testing. Cyber security research and education is connected to the homeland security agencies and defense through funding, mutual interest in the outcome of the research, and the potential job market for graduates. The future of cyber security is both defensive information assurance measures and active defense driven information operations that jointly and coordinately are launched, in the pursuit of a cohesive and decisive execution of the national cyber defense strategy. The cohesive cyber defense requires universities to optimize their campus wide resources to fuse knowledge, intellectual capacity, and practical skills in an unprecedented way in cyber security. The future will require cyber defense research teams to address not only computer science, electrical engineering, software and hardware security, but also political theory, institutional theory, behavioral science, deterrence theory, ethics, international law, international relations, and additional social sciences. This paper is the result of an ocular survey of the U.S. 48 academic CAE-R research centers, evaluating the collective group of research centers' ability to adapt to the shift towards cyber operations, and the challenges therein.