New Cybersecurity Center Kicks Off with Workshop

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) will host a kickoff workshop on Tuesday, June 26, 2012. The workshop's goal is to introduce the center, which will bring together experts from industry, government and academia to develop practical, interoperable cybersecurity approaches that address the real-world needs of complex IT systems. The center is a partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the State of Maryland and Montgomery County.

The center is a public-private partnership designed to accelerate the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies. Workshop attendees will learn about the center's public-private structure and how they can participate. They will have the chance to provide input on possible "use case" analyses that are expected to form a central focus of the center's collaborative efforts.

Use cases are a standard tool of software engineers used to define specific function requirements of a system from the point of view of a user trying to accomplish a specific task. The use cases developed by NCCoE will incorporate the IT security needs of specific communities or sectors. Examples of candidate sectors include health care, finance and utilities. The use case selection process will include input from the users and vendors of security technologies, as well as government agencies, academia and others.

At the workshop, a series of panels will explain different aspects of the center, including how use communities will form and how they will translate their needs into security requirements for the center; what constitutes a use case and how it will capture a community's needs and communicate pertinent information; how industry and others can participate and the nature of the center's output; and more.

The workshop will be held at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, Md., from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. More information and registration for the workshop is available online. Registration closes at 5 p.m. EST on June 20.

For more information on the NCCoE, visit https://nccoe.nist.gov/. For technical questions on the center or workshop, contact Matthew Scholl, matthew.scholl [at] nist.gov (matthew[dot]scholl[at]nist[dot]gov), (301) 975-2941.