UNM’s Information Assurance Program Receives $1.67 Million NSF Grant

The Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico has received a five-year, $1.67 mil­lion grant from the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion to pro­vide 18 schol­ar­ships for Master’s degree study in Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance (IA) and cyber-security at the Ander­son School of Man­age­ment. The project, titled “UNM Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance Schol­ar­ship for Ser­vice (SFS) Pro­gram,” is under the direc­tion of ASM Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor and Prin­ci­pal Inves­ti­ga­tor Stephen Burd, and co-PI’s Alex Seazzu, direc­tor, UNM Cen­ter for Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance Research and Edu­ca­tion (CIARE), Jed Cran­dall, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor, Com­puter Sci­ence, and Elec­tri­cal Com­puter Engi­neer­ing Asso­ciate Provost and Chair Gre­gory Heileman.

“Infor­ma­tion assur­ance includes tech­ni­cal aspects of com­puter and net­work secu­rity but extends them to include related areas such as data pro­tec­tion, pri­vacy, eco­nom­ics, fraud, audit­ing and effec­tive pro­tec­tion within the con­text of human behav­ior and mod­ern orga­ni­za­tions,” said Burd. “UNM’s infor­ma­tion assur­ance pro­gram pro­vides stu­dents with a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary approach to infor­ma­tion assur­ance that lever­ages strong fac­ulty resources, research, and edu­ca­tional pro­grams in mul­ti­ple UNM departments.”

“The pro­gram will pro­duce grad­u­ates who can suc­cess­fully apply IA con­cepts and tech­nol­ogy to directly address tech­ni­cal, behav­ioral, orga­ni­za­tional and eco­nomic fac­tors that can often limit IA effec­tive­ness,” Seazzu said.

The UNM SFS pro­gram will pre­pare infor­ma­tion assur­ance pro­fes­sion­als for ser­vice in fed­eral, state, local and tribal gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies. Stu­dents must com­plete a sum­mer intern­ship and work for a gov­ern­men­tal agency after grad­u­a­tion. The UNM SFS pro­gram will enhance exist­ing degree pro­grams by expand­ing rela­tion­ships with fed­eral employ­ers, diver­si­fy­ing the type and increas­ing the scope of recruit­ment activ­i­ties, expand­ing cur­ricu­lum, and increas­ing the num­ber and vari­ety of internships.

The project defines ambi­tious tar­get enroll­ments includ­ing 40 per­cent minor­ity and 40 per­cent female.

“Since 2007, our goal was to pro­vide as many oppor­tu­ni­ties for our stu­dents as pos­si­ble,” said Seazzu. “This is another one of those oppor­tu­ni­ties. The demand for IA pro­fes­sion­als keeps increas­ing with more and more infor­ma­tion resources need­ing pro­tec­tion. Nowa­days, sys­tems are every­where and there is a greater aware­ness involv­ing safe­guard­ing the nation at dif­fer­ent lev­els. This is a great oppor­tu­nity for our stu­dents. UNM’s sta­tus as a His­panic Serv­ing Insti­tu­tion, and its sig­nif­i­cant enroll­ment of women and Native Amer­i­cans, will assist the expan­sion of the nation’s cyber-security work­force with a diverse mix of pro­gram graduates.”

The pro­gram incor­po­rates tech­ni­cal resources from New Mexico’s national lab­o­ra­to­ries, the FBI’s New Mex­ico Regional Com­puter Foren­sics Lab (NM RCFL), and UNM fac­ulty and cur­ricu­lum in com­puter sci­ence, engi­neer­ing, and man­age­ment. The program’s empha­sis on expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing (e.g., national cyber-competitions, course­ware devel­op­ment, fraud pre­ven­tion audits, K-12 out­reach and com­mu­nity cyber-security assess­ments) inte­grates edu­ca­tion and research while pro­mot­ing ongo­ing dis­cov­ery into the learn­ing process.

“I think stu­dent sup­port is vital to the suc­cess of any pro­gram, espe­cially those that require extra train­ing like cyber-security,” said Doug Brown, dean, Ander­son School of Man­age­ment.
“Our national secu­rity is heav­ily com­mit­ted against cyber attacks,” Brown said. “It’s clearly one of the next fields of bat­tle and we bet­ter be good at it.”

The UNM SFS pro­gram will recruit schol­ar­ship recip­i­ents from under­grad­u­ate pro­grams in com­puter sci­ence, engi­neer­ing, infor­ma­tion sys­tems, and account­ing in New Mex­ico and nearby states.

Infor­ma­tion about the appli­ca­tion process will be posted as soon as pos­si­ble. A pro­jected start date for the new schol­ar­ship recip­i­ents is ten­ta­tively sched­uled for Spring 2014.

For more infor­ma­tion about UNM’s Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance pro­gram, visit: Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance.