University of California and Los Alamos National Laboratory Researchers Receive $3.6M to Secure Smart Campuses

Riverside, Ca – (www.ucr.edu) — A consortium consisting of UC Riverside, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, together with Los Alamos National Laboratory, was awarded $3.6 million for a three-year project, “Securing smart campuses: a holistic multi-layer approach,” through the 2018 UC Laboratory Fees Research Program.

The project will build security and privacy for “smart campuses” that present a microcosm of smart cities and, more generally, human cyber-physical systems, in which computer, physical, and human aspects are thoroughly integrated.

The collaborative project, co-led by UC Riverside and UCLA, aims to develop a holistic framework to enhance the security, privacy, and safety of campus operation, building on the team’s expertise in cyber-physical systems security, information and wireless security, software and hardware security, and privacy-preserving machine learning.

School campuses, businesses, as well as academic and private labs increasingly integrate sensing, computation, and communication in their physical environment to control their operation and more efficiently serve their communities.

As cyber-physical systems become both larger and more complex and come to incorporate entire cities, attackers could cause a full-scale disaster simply by manipulating one aspect of the system.

The UC and Los Alamos researchers will identify new avenues of attack that span physical and cyber components and create a formal security framework.

About UC Riverside

The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California’s diverse culture, UCR’s enrollment is now nearly 23,000 students.