A Roadmap for Cybersecurity Research,
Department of Homeland Security,
November 2009

This Roadmap document resulted from an extensive effort to characterize eleven cybersecurity-relevant topic areas that are critically important for future research, development, test, evaluation, tech transfer, and ultimate use. The Roadmap should be of considerable use not only to the Science and Technology Directorate in the Department of Homeland Security, but also to other R&D funding agencies within the U.S. Government. In particular, although all of the topics are directly relevant to the charter of organizations within DHS, it is expected that some of these topics will selectively be of specific immediate interest to other government funding institutions as well—and of course, potentially useful in stimulating new directions within the various cybersecurity-related R&D communities. Furthermore, although each topic is individually important, the interrelations and desired synergies among the different areas must also be considered—because of the inherently system-oriented nature of the problems involved. Overall, the Roadmap document should be valuable in encouraging future R&D toward successful collaborative pursuits of the Roadmap topic areas, which can have vital impacts on the future of the United States as well as internationally.

The Roadmap document is available online.

It provides considerable detail on the eleven problem areas that are considered to be both extremely critical and extremely difficult:

1. Scalable trustworthy systems (including architectures and methodologies)
2. Enterprise-level metrics (including total-system trustworthiness)
3. Lifecycle of system evaluation (including assurance)
4. Combatting insider threats
5. Combatting malware and botnets
6. Global-scale identity management
7. Survivability of time-critical systems
8. Situational awareness and attack attribution
9. Provenance (relating to information, systems, and hardware)
10. Privacy-aware security
11. Usable security

Four appendices follow the examination of each of the eleven problem areas:

Appendix A: Interdependencies among Topics
Appendix B: Technology Transfer
Appendix C: Participants in the Roadmap Development
Appendix D: Acronyms

Each of the eleven areas clearly requires significantly more effort, as the problem areas are inherently complex. In particular, the Roadmap document considers various approaches and needs for future research, prototype development, system test and evaluation, and technology transfer. In addition, Appendix A demonstrates the considerable extent to which the eleven problem areas are interrelated; it gives some guidance on how they might be pursued in the future. Appendix B considers the pervasive importance of technology transfer and how it might be effectively facilitated. Appendix C lists all the people who participated in the technical development of the roadmap. Appendix D expands the acronyms used in the document, as a convenience to readers.

For each of the eleven topic areas, the Roadmap document was developed based on three in-person workshop sessions, with two sets of eleven three-hour conference calls interspersed, over a period of about 15 months. This process made extensive use of the insights and collected experience of many experts in relevant communities. Indeed, participation of 83 individuals spanning a cross-section of industry, academia, and government greatly contributed to the breadth, depth, and quality of the Roadmap. SRI had the primary role, organizing the workshops, coordinating the various efforts, carrying out most of the writing, responding to external review, and subsequently editing and producing the final document—with numerous interactions from the participants throughout.