Cybersecurity and Information Assurance

The CSIA Interagency Working Group (IWG) was created in 2006 to coordinate Federal cybersecurity R&D across 16 participating agencies and support their research activities to protect U.S. information and information systems from cyber threats. Guided by the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan and aligned with NIST’s Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, the IWG focuses on the safety and security of systems that underpin a vast array of capabilities and technologies in multiple sectors, including power generation, transportation, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and national security.

Strategic Priorities

• Deter: The ability to efficiently discourage malicious cyber activities by increasing the costs, risks, and uncertainty to adversaries and diminishing their spoils.
• Protect: The ability of components, systems, users, and critical infrastructure to efficiently resist malicious cyber activities and to ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability.
• Detect: The ability to efficiently detect, and even anticipate, adversary decisions and activities, given that systems should be assumed to be vulnerable to malicious cyber activities.
• Respond: When malicious cyber activity is detected, the ability of defenses, defenders, and infrastructure to dynamically react, adapt, counter, recover, maintain operations, complete restoration, and prevent repeat attacks.