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SDAIA addresses a critical need for security solutions for Science DMZ networks, and further represents a strategic value of establishing an intelligence foothold that will benefit our national cyberinfrastructure (CI) through greater situational awareness. Secondly, we aim to provide the cybersecurity research community with a rich, real-world intelligence source upon which to test their theories, tools, and techniques. Our efforts are in response to recent NSF investment and efforts by ESnet that have spurred a rapid growth of open high performance networks or so-called Science DMZ [DMZ] deployments. Science DMZs support big data and access to high-performance computation through very high bandwidth networks in an open environment that presents new challenges to the traditional university security stance.
Science DMZs are positioned in front of campus firewalls to enhance performance and this translates into the need for new security solutions. Crucially it must be done in a way that is simple to deploy and affordable on a higher education budget. Our proposal will provide a holistic approach that will address the special Science DMZ architecture through a new kind of virtual security appliance that will benefit from external, shared intelligence to protect the site, and further provide intelligence to the wider community of both DMZ operators and cybersecurity researchers. This appliance will leverage existing technologies; be easy to deploy, configure, and maintain; integrate with common Science DMZ services, and be built upon free and open source software for affordability and flexibility. In addition, our solution will be developed with an awareness of software defined networking (SDN) to ensure that our approach can readily integrate with emerging SDN-based networks.
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