UAlbany is an anchor institution regionally for cybersecurity education and research, working with regional public sector and economic development partners to foster cybersecurity innovation, public-private partnerships, and industry job growth throughout New York’s Capital District.
Collaboration Agreement with Industry for Regional Cyber Innovation (EDA/Local Industry)
FACETS has received a grant from the EDA (Department of Commerce) to foster cybersecurity innovation, public-private partnerships and cyber job growth in New York Capital District.
Goals include:
- Increased cohesion among cybersecurity researchers, industry leaders, and collaboration opportunities;
- Cybersecurity entrepreneurs and small businesses, with access to UAlbany’s entrepreneurial resources, and cyber innovation lab for product R&D;
- Information technology and cybersecurity students (i.e., 2-year, 4-year and graduate level students) with increased regional internship, networking, and employment prospects;
- High school and community college students particularly in distressed areas, with increased access to cybersecurity curricula, internship opportunities, and an articulated pipeline to a 4-year cybersecurity university program.
Towards this goal we are soliciting proposals from industry/government to work on cyber security projects. The ideal projects would be of 6-month duration and will help innovate or improve regional cyber security. through the grant, the university will use its facilities and resources to work in collaboration with partner researchers on these projects.
The project should include: a title, summary, description (including motivation), project plan/timeline, and expected outcomes. The firms can prepare the proposal or we can jointly work on the proposal.
Our resources include:
- Expandable network of 64 machines through which we can launch simulated cyber-attacks
- Behavioral cyber security lab where we can conduct behavioral experiments
- Expertise in data analytics and machine learning
- Expertise in statistical analysis, data collection, and research design
- Compute cluster for high performance computing
- Graduate and undergraduate students trained in research
Email proposals and questions to Sanjay Goel.
Previous Collaborations
Alchar Printing
Contact: Denise Padula
Phone: 518-274-2421
Description: This project includes product and market research to convert their business model to fulfill online orders and expand their online market to reach their target audience. Additionally, a secure website was implemented to establish an online order platform, streamline the order process and increase online visibility.
Outcomes: Two full-time equivalent were jobs saved and the project allowed the insight of qualified outside resources to evaluate social media platforms that have been overlooked and identified ways to better utilize these resources to maximize social media presence. This is expected to lead to increased revenue for the company post COVID-19.
CHAaSM
Contact: Devin Breen
Phone: 518-495-8299
Description: UAlbany interns were assigned to the Customer Development Team and had the opportunity to work directly on a product release to gather critical customer data and feedback to help customers move through beta and provide critical insight to the product development team based on customer feedback. Interns were assigned to COO, CTO, or CEO.
Outcomes: Four jobs were created that helped expand our ecosystem and develop partnerships. Additionally, brand awareness was established through outreach. The project could generate revenue in the near-term, with multi-million dollar potential.
Data Spotlite / Cyrisma
Contact: Liam Downward
Phone: 585-200-7117
Description: The goal of this project is to crosswalk the functions and features of our Cyber Security Solution CYRISMA to controls from different compliance mandates such as, but not limited to: PCI, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA, GDPR, NIST, and CIS. On completion, our student team mapped 50 out of 250+ controls for NIST-800-53 to our tool. If an organization decides to utilize all of the functions and features within our solution of the crosswalk, they will automatically comply with 50 controls from the 250+.
Outcomes: Data Spotlite has been able to focus on its market and increase their business opportunities. “The help of the interns working on the projects has allowed me to focus on sales. We have been able to close about 50k of new business and also about 100k in contract negotiations during their tenure with Data Spotlite," Liam Downward (Data Spotlite CEO) said.
Iconoclasm
Contact: Cameron Hackett
Phone: 920-445-1310
Description: Project I included interns placed in the operations unit at Iconoclasm Inc. during the summer of 2020 and had the opportunity to be the collective CISO of a software company. They performed software and infrastructure audits, detailed threat models, conducted introductory-level digital forensics, contributed to documentation and documented their research and lessons learned as part of a content marketing campaign. The overall focus was to produce work and research that informs the security posture of the organization as the firm moves to a public release of their platform and test their own tools in the digital forensics space within the firm.
Project II included interns placed in the business unit at Iconoclasm Inc. during the summer of 2020 and conducted market research, sales research, compliance research, mock audits and other corresponding high-value tasks. The overall focus was to ensure that Iconoclasm Inc. is aware of potential compliance and legal pitfalls by conducting research and outreach to attain this information. The interns produced reports on each of these fields as a deliverable, which were then be disseminated to internal and external stakeholders.
Outcomes: "The impact has been exponential. Having the ability to have five different sets of eyes on projects with the backgrounds that our individuals do has been paramount. It has reduced our time to market by roughly one and a half months. Iconoclasm Inc. has been benefitted massively from this project. To have the interns’ sharp minds act as extensions of ours as founders to tackle projects that are very important but not possible for us to humanly do," the firm said.
Albany Small Business Development Center
Contact: Kate Baker
Phone: 518-347-7701
Description: This project assisted the Albany SBDC with their transition to Microsoft Teams which includes research of best practices for MS Teams utilization, specifically for an organization that have a variety of degrees of technical abilities, identify unique ways to implement the platform, development of cheat sheets for common tasks and identify group ownership of the platform, etc.
Outcomes: Increased efficiency for the team to allow more time to meet with local small businesses.
FACETS
Contact: Sanjay Goel
Phone: 518-495-5500
Description: The goal of the project was to develop the toolset to run live attacks in a quarantined environment to be able to collect data for researchers and companies testing their products. This includes tools for launching attacks, random noise generators for mimicking live networking environment, sensors for data collection, tools for memory extraction and analytic tools. The project has made remarkable progress where most of the toolset is in place and will go through tests in the next quarter and then automate in the subsequent quarter. In addition, the project plans to extract an IPC communication graph and then use the graph analysis and machine learning to detect malicious processes that run in memory.
Outcomes: This tool set will help create data required by firms to accelerate their tool testing and new tool development in the intrusion detection and dynamic network defense fields. This research will help bring new tools for improving cyber security of firms.
Digital Forensics Advisory Board
The Digital Forensics Advisory Board consists of top industry practitioners share their valuable expertise to ensure innovative, state-of-the-art cyber security education and research.
