Grad Students Work with MIT on Cybersecurity Research

University of Arizona engineering students have for the last five years collaborated nationally to answer the most pressing cybersecurity questions of our time and prepare for careers in this critical field.

Students who take SIE 472/572 INSuRE, a mixed undergraduate and graduate class, participate each spring in the Information Security Research and Education Collaborative. Universities that the National Security Agency has designated National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity are connected with government agencies, national labs and federally funded research and development centers. Program goals include improving cybersecurity workforce skills, meeting the need for more workers, and engaging the students in problems of national interest.

Electrical engineering doctoral students Arminda Estrada and Ivan Kawaminami, plus graduate student Youssef Elsakkary, were paired with technical directors Jeremy Kepner and Hayden Jananthan from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. To help organizations defend against cyberattacks, the trio took on the challenge of better identifying the cyber characteristics of large-scale network data, using snapshots of darkspace internet data that was present when the information was collected.

They published a research paper through IEEE and presented their findings at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference in September 2022.

“We were able to get very close to real-world data analysis. This experience and research gave us the tools and knowledge to analyze enormous amounts of data and simultaneously helped us understand what the data meant,” said Estrada.